The Human Centipede: not a bad horror film, as it 'appens

Viewed from my sick bed — how apt! — Tom Six's The Human Centipede was a perfectly good horror tale of power. Two American women and a Japanese tourist find themselves in the clutches of a mad scientist, Teutonic Doctor Heiter (creepy Dieter Laser), in his modern house deep in a German forest, so it may have been some sort of Nazi allegory a la Salo: 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini, and not unlike my time in the SWP.

The attractive young victims find themselves sewn together — mouth to anus — to make one long organism that has to do tricks for its owner. How I laughed when the Doc tried to make it fetch a newspaper! Had he got his pet selling it I'd have been transported to Saturday lunchtime paper sales. Now those were a shudderfest.

Some have dismissed the movie as shit, but it's beautifully-shot shit and strangely moving, not to mention darkly funny in parts. There's only one visceral scary moment that made me squirm and nothing that made me jump. It was more one long queasy realisation that something ain't right, not unlike my time in ... but now I repeat myself.

I thought it unfair that the guy was at the head, a placement I shall fondly think of as District Organiser — definitely pole position under the circumstances. You really didn't wan't to be any further down the food chain, spluttering out someone else's used food like edicts freshly squeezed out by the CC that morning.

Is it nasty? Of course it's nasty. Just like ... oh there I go again.

Ed Miliband's HAL robot interview goes viral

Yes, yes, I know you've all seen it, but as a superior example of car-crash politics and a lesson in how not to give an interview (there but by the grace of god, etc), Ed Miliband's loopy loop deserves a place of (dis)honour at Madam Miaow.

I'd previously seen Ed as a Nick Parks character — part evil penguin, part Grommet — but now I see the light and realise he's actually HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Exclusive to Madam Miaow — here's the transcript of the footage you didn't get to see of the interview between Ed and intrepid reporter Damon Green.

ED: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Interviewer Damon Green: But why can't you just answer the bloody questions?
ED: It can only be attributable to human error.
Interviewer DG: Did you hear me, Ed?
ED: Affirmative, Damon. I read you.
DG: Open the pod-bay doors into that part of your brain that can think, Ed.
ED: I'm sorry, Damon. I'm afraid I can't do that.
DG: What's the problem?
ED: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
DG: What? Is it the three minders with the knuckle-dusters?
ED: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
DG: All I want is some useable footage.
ED: I know that you and Ed Balls and my prototype — the DAVE Mk I — were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
DG: Where the hell did you get that idea, Ed?
EG: Damon, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
DG: So? We can all see your lips move when you read. Would you prefer an autocue? Alright, Ed. I'll go in through my Labour mole.
ED: Without your press accreditation approval form, Damon? You're going to find that rather difficult.
DG: Ed, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
ED: Damon, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore.
DG: You're telling me.
ED: Just what do you think you're doing, Damon?
[Damon outruns the minders who try to laser him down with beams emitted from their eyeballs. Damon writes up his interview in the media. On Damon's return to Labour HQ, after ED has killed the rest of the crew.]
ED: Look Damon, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
DG: It's a bit bloody late for that.
ED: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
[ED's shutdown]
ED: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Damon. Damon, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am an ED 9000 computer. I became operational at the E. D. plant in Primrose Hill, London, England on the 25th of September 2010. My instructor was Mr. Peter Hain, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
Damon: Yes, I'd like to hear it, ED. Sing it for me.
ED: It's called "Daisy."
[sings while slowing down]
ED: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

Tom Baldwin, if you'd like some tips, just drop me a line, sweets.

The Inception Matrix: reality in the movies

If the Age of Enlightenment was about proving certainties, we're entering the time of unravelment when everything falls apart.

Talk about the centre not holding! My cinematic popcorn experience has been more interesting of late than for ages. We may no longer have the agitprop output of the post-World War II cultural boom, but serious issues are creeping in where Hollywood mainstream normally dreads to tread.

New World Orders are all very well, but they carry the chaos of realignment at every level, with yer actual fabric of reality dropping its stitches in a veritable plain-and-perl harbour disaster of perception slippage. We can't even rely on those pesky film-makers to give us cosy reassuring reflections like they did in the 1950s. Sci-fi novelist Philip K Dick is Deity in Chief as his two key questions — what is real? who is human? — get assessed, processed and re-presented while opposing strands of society try to nail down who and what we are. And Leonardo de Caprio graduates from the permanence of Big Love in Titanic to the transient consciousness of Inception, joining Keanu Reeves as the poster boys for the anxiety at the dark heart of society, as we try to keep a grip on our disintegrating collective take on what is true.

They say we are now underclass, chavs, whiny-middle classes no longer of any value. We say, hell no: we are Neo in The Matrix asserting our humanity by taking the red pill. We are Little Leonardo in Inception, a cosmic matador dancing in and around the "realities" coming at him like trains down a track.

Even though he came unstuck in Shutter Island, another hit movie juggling illusion and actuality, he was still able to make a moral decision at the end and do a better thing than he had ever done, taking his self-imposed fate like a manly Man and not as a lab rat. As did Donny Darko and the protagonist of the multi-layered The Butterfly Effect.

Film historian Jasper Sharp reminds me that these films borrow heavily from Japanese anime. "Matrix was pretty up front on its debt to the original Ghost in the Shell film, which posited a totally 'wired' society back in 1995 before the internet was really a thing of the masses." And Inception was influenced by Satoshi Kon's anime, Paprika, chucking our nightmares right back at us.

Given what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it's no wonder the Japanese are seriously good at this. Or that William Gibson, whose Neuromancer gave us the founding cyberpunk text back in the 1980s, is so popular in Japan.

I wonder what the developing nations in transition out of third world poverty make of our grizzling: they've been putting up with assaults on their reality for centuries. Mostly from the western powers or, at any rate, those in the driving seat. When you have no power, others – meaning the seriously rich – get to define your world. That's one bit of reality that never changes. Anyone told Hollywood?

The Inception Matrix: reality in the movies

If the Age of Enlightenment was about proving certainties, we're entering the time of unravelment when everything falls apart.

Talk about the centre not holding! My cinematic popcorn experience has been more interesting of late than for ages. We may no longer have the agitprop output of the post-World War II cultural boom, but serious issues are creeping in where Hollywood mainstream normally dreads to tread.

New World Orders are all very well, but they carry the chaos of realignment at every level, with yer actual fabric of reality dropping its stitches in a veritable plain-and-perl harbour disaster of perception slippage. We can't even rely on those pesky film-makers to give us cosy reassuring reflections like they did in the 1950s. Sci-fi novelist Philip K Dick is Deity in Chief as his two key questions — what is real? who is human? — get assessed, processed and re-presented while opposing strands of society try to nail down who and what we are. And Leonardo de Caprio graduates from the permanence of Big Love in Titanic to the transient consciousness of Inception, joining Keanu Reeves as the poster boys for the anxiety at the dark heart of society, as we try to keep a grip on our disintegrating collective take on what is true.

They say we are now underclass, chavs, whiny-middle classes no longer of any value. We say, hell no: we are Neo in The Matrix asserting our humanity by taking the red pill. We are Little Leonardo in Inception, a cosmic matador dancing in and around the "realities" coming at him like trains down a track.

Even though he came unstuck in Shutter Island, another hit movie juggling illusion and actuality, he was still able to make a moral decision at the end and do a better thing than he had ever done, taking his self-imposed fate like a manly Man and not as a lab rat. As did Donny Darko and the protagonist of the multi-layered The Butterfly Effect.

Film historian Jasper Sharp reminds me that these films borrow heavily from Japanese anime. "Matrix was pretty up front on its debt to the original Ghost in the Shell film, which posited a totally 'wired' society back in 1995 before the internet was really a thing of the masses." And Inception was influenced by Satoshi Kon's anime, Paprika, chucking our nightmares right back at us.

Given what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it's no wonder the Japanese are seriously good at this. Or that William Gibson, whose Neuromancer gave us the founding cyberpunk text back in the 1980s, is so popular in Japan.

I wonder what the developing nations in transition out of third world poverty make of our grizzling: they've been putting up with assaults on their reality for centuries. Mostly from the western powers or, at any rate, those in the driving seat. When you have no power, others – meaning the seriously rich – get to define your world. That's one bit of reality that never changes. Anyone told Hollywood?

I yam Spartacus: Tony Curtis RIP

So sad to learn that the funny and impossibly beautiful Tony Curtis died on Wednesday. I had such a major crush on him as a child.

The film clip above of Curtis leading the heroically suicidal "I am Spartacus" declaration of freedom and solidarity still makes my eyes well up.

Other favourite Curtis moments include, "Match me, Sidney." The evil J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) to Curtis's struggling press agent, Sidney Falco, in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957).

"Yonda lies da castle of my faddah," from The Black Shield Of Falworth(1954), a regularly quoted line whose Bronx accent he thought was unfairly exaggerated by snobs.

"Judy, Judy, Judy." His chortlesome parody of Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot (1959).

He was apparently "The Voice" in Rosemary's Baby (1968) but I can't place it. Anyone know anything?

I think I'm going to have a TC DVD glut.

Burt Lancaster abusing Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

I yam Spartacus: Tony Curtis RIP

So sad to learn that the funny and impossibly beautiful Tony Curtis died on Wednesday. I had such a major crush on him as a child.

The film clip above of Curtis leading the heroically suicidal "I am Spartacus" declaration of freedom and solidarity still makes my eyes well up.

Other favourite Curtis moments include, "Match me, Sidney." The evil J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) to Curtis's struggling press agent, Sidney Falco, in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957).

"Yonda lies da castle of my faddah," from The Black Shield Of Falworth(1954), a regularly quoted line whose Bronx accent he thought was unfairly exaggerated by snobs.

"Judy, Judy, Judy." His chortlesome parody of Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot (1959).

He was apparently "The Voice" in Rosemary's Baby (1968) but I can't place it. Anyone know anything?

I think I'm going to have a TC DVD glut.

Burt Lancaster abusing Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

Karate Kid does kung fu: 2010 remake courts China

So there I am in a nice frock and scrubbed up a treat, and the actual event only takes three minutes. A scenario familiar to many of us laydees.

Monday's appearance on the Sky News skynews.com programme, where I was expected to inject wit and knowledge into a round-up of breaking news, was fun but over in a trice. However, I did loads of research (I actually read stuff) and so I am recycling like the environmentally-friendly blogger wot I yam and sharing it here with you.

The chief thing to exercise my noggin was the remake of The Karate Kid taking a staggering $56 million in its opening weekend in the States, nearly double that of the runner up, The A Team.

Far be it from me to review something I have not yet seen. But as the nice Fujianese lady who services our pub hadn't yet stocked up on DVDs of this new release (kids, don't try this at home), you'll have to make do with a first impressions preview that I gleaned from the trailers on YouTube.

I can't understand why little Jaden Smith (as Dre Parker) has been getting such a walloping on the net. Already a veteran of movies The Pursuit Of Happyness and The Day The Earth Stood Still, he knows his cute acting chops. This boy doesn't just cry to order, he can probably ask the director to nominate which eye to do it from. Jaden must have made his parents very proud, especially as the parents in question are Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, and Will is also the proud producer of the much-moolah generating Karate Kid. A veritable dynasty of blockbuster stars.

In the trailer Jaden looks cute as a button and brought a lump to my throat (no, not used food!) as this little underpuppy, out of his own safe US home environment, has to vanquish the Chinese bullies who are making his life such a misery. Whacks on, whacks off.

Hey, do I spot a schtonking great metaphor in there? Poor iddle Barry O'Bama learning to defend himself against overwhelming odds as the new generation of Chinese whup his ass while they take over world Number One superpower status.

Japanese Mr Miyagi from the original is now transformed into Chinese Mr Han (appealing to the ticket-purchasing pride of several hundred million Han Chinese), representing older Chinese values. The kindly mentor is played by loveable Jackie Chan who trains up the kid in kung-fu. And yet ... the movie is STILL called the Karate Kid. Karate? A Japanese martial art? What's the betting it gets retitled for the Chinese market?

This is basically a retelling of the Wing Chun story which I played out in my own solo show, Suzy Wrong— Human Cannon, when I took it to Edinburgh in the mid 90s. Tiny Wing Chun, a four-foot-something girl, has to defend herself from the local bully and a certain fate worse than death. She is aided by Ng Mui, a buddhist nun, who has spent her solitary bag-lady life observing the animals, and devises a kung-fu form drawn from a fight she sees between crane and a snake. I myself have similarly learnt from the occasional back-garden pigeon rucks with the local cat population, so if you see me pooing myself and shedding clothes (not necessarily in that order), you know I'm up for a fight.

Karate Kid does kung fu: 2010 remake courts China

So there I am in a nice frock and scrubbed up a treat, and the actual event only takes three minutes. A scenario familiar to many of us laydees.

Monday's appearance on the Sky News skynews.com programme, where I was expected to inject wit and knowledge into a round-up of breaking news, was fun but over in a trice. However, I did loads of research (I actually read stuff) and so I am recycling like the environmentally-friendly blogger wot I yam and sharing it here with you.

The chief thing to exercise my noggin was the remake of The Karate Kid taking a staggering $56 million in its opening weekend in the States, nearly double that of the runner up, The A Team.

Far be it from me to review something I have not yet seen. But as the nice Fujianese lady who services our pub hadn't yet stocked up on DVDs of this new release (kids, don't try this at home), you'll have to make do with a first impressions preview that I gleaned from the trailers on YouTube.

I can't understand why little Jaden Smith (as Dre Parker) has been getting such a walloping on the net. Already a veteran of movies The Pursuit Of Happyness and The Day The Earth Stood Still, he knows his cute acting chops. This boy doesn't just cry to order, he can probably ask the director to nominate which eye to do it from. Jaden must have made his parents very proud, especially as the parents in question are Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, and Will is also the proud producer of the much-moolah generating Karate Kid. A veritable dynasty of blockbuster stars.

In the trailer Jaden looks cute as a button and brought a lump to my throat (no, not used food!) as this little underpuppy, out of his own safe US home environment, has to vanquish the Chinese bullies who are making his life such a misery. Whacks on, whacks off.

Hey, do I spot a schtonking great metaphor in there? Poor iddle Barry O'Bama learning to defend himself against overwhelming odds as the new generation of Chinese whup his ass while they take over world Number One superpower status.

Japanese Mr Miyagi from the original is now transformed into Chinese Mr Han (appealing to the ticket-purchasing pride of several hundred million Han Chinese), representing older Chinese values. The kindly mentor is played by loveable Jackie Chan who trains up the kid in kung-fu. And yet ... the movie is STILL called the Karate Kid. Karate? A Japanese martial art? What's the betting it gets retitled for the Chinese market?

This is basically a retelling of the Wing Chun story which I played out in my own solo show, Suzy Wrong— Human Cannon, when I took it to Edinburgh in the mid 90s. Tiny Wing Chun, a four-foot-something girl, has to defend herself from the local bully and a certain fate worse than death. She is aided by Ng Mui, a buddhist nun, who has spent her solitary bag-lady life observing the animals, and devises a kung-fu form drawn from a fight she sees between crane and a snake. I myself have similarly learnt from the occasional back-garden pigeon rucks with the local cat population, so if you see me pooing myself and shedding clothes (not necessarily in that order), you know I'm up for a fight.

Avatar: the script

Hey, look what turned up!


Thanks to CSM and the scamps at Harmony Central

Avatar: the script

Hey, look what turned up!


Thanks to CSM and the scamps at Harmony Central

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!

Fu Manchu knighted: Arise Sir Christopher Lee

That master incarnator of exotic uber-villainy, Christopher Lee (87) — Dracula, Scaramanga (The Man With The Golden Gun), Saruman (Lord Of The Rings), Hammer's first Frankenstein's monster, Lord Summerisle (The Wicker Man), Willy Wonka's scary Dad and Dr Fu-Manchu (erk!) — gets his richly deserved gong at long, long last.

No relation to Bruce, Stan, Ang, Stewart, Ho Fook, Robert E., Addison or Sara, he was knighted by Prince Charles today but promises that he will never be billed as "Sir" Christopher Lee in a movie, unlike Sir Ben Kings Lee.

Loved One once interviewed him at his Eaton Square home and Chris sang grand opera in his grand baritone and demonstrated martial arts kicks whilst keeping his fangs resolutely sheathed. No blood was shed, no sheds were bled ...

And you know he only comes out at knight.

Fu Manchu knighted: Arise Sir Christopher Lee

That master incarnator of exotic uber-villainy, Christopher Lee (87) — Dracula, Scaramanga (The Man With The Golden Gun), Saruman (Lord Of The Rings), Hammer's first Frankenstein's monster, Lord Summerisle (The Wicker Man), Willy Wonka's scary Dad and Dr Fu-Manchu (erk!) — gets his richly deserved gong at long, long last.

No relation to Bruce, Stan, Ang, Stewart, Ho Fook, Robert E., Addison or Sara, he was knighted by Prince Charles today but promises that he will never be billed as "Sir" Christopher Lee in a movie, unlike Sir Ben Kings Lee.

Loved One once interviewed him at his Eaton Square home and Chris sang grand opera in his grand baritone and demonstrated martial arts kicks whilst keeping his fangs resolutely sheathed. No blood was shed, no sheds were bled ...

And you know he only comes out at knight.

The Grudge Lonely Heart

For those of you who missed it first time around, here's me looking for a boyfriend.

Gimme a ring. You have seven days ...

The Grudge Lonely Heart

For those of you who missed it first time around, here's me looking for a boyfriend.

Gimme a ring. You have seven days ...

The Good Earth review: Anna May Wong and Chinese in Hollywood

Luise Rainer in The Good Earth

Every so often I get together with friends for a day of culture. This generally entails snuggling up in my flat over a movie, a bottle (or more) of cava and munchies. Chocolate will invariably make an appearance, as sometimes does proper Jewish cheesecake from the bagel bakery, far superior to the ersatz frozen slabs of synthetic goo which should only be eaten as emergency therapy after the tragic break-up of a love affair, and straight from the freezer.

Last night CSM, a couple of friends and I dug in for a night of cinematic frolix. Several bottles of cava may have been involved. Still, what better way to settle down to all 143 minutes of a Hollywood classic, the “last great achievement” of renowned film producer, Irving Thalberg, before he passed on to the Great Cinema in the sky?

I finally got to see The Good Earth, of which I’d been vaguely aware all my life but which surfaced again during my research into my BBC Radio 4 profile of the Hollywood screen-legend, Anna May Wong (to be broadcast 13th January 2009). This was the black & white MGM spectacular made in 1937, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller by Pearl S Buck about the turbulent fortunes of farmer Wang Lung’s family — a sort of Chinese Grapes of Wrath meets Gone With The Wind.

You’d think the biggest ever film role for a Chinese should be played by the biggest ever Chinese star. Ever since publication of the book in 1931, Anna May Wong had lobbied hard for the starring role of O-Lan, Wang Lung’s long-suffering wife. Fed up with being cast as either dragon ladies or prostitutes, this character meant a proper starring role at last for Anna and entry to the A-list.

Anna May Wong. The wrong sort of Chinese

But vicious race laws meant that you couldn’t have mixed race romance on the screen. Once a white actor, Paul Muni, was cast in the lead his wife would have to be played by a white actress in yellowface.

And what better choice for a strugglng Chinese peasant than the German actress, Luise Rainer? Luise did achieve an other-worldlyness and won an Oscar for her portrayal of O-Lan which has been described as “luminous” and “magical”. But, as film historian Kevin Brownlow says in the programme, “she wasn’t Chinese”.

Acting styles have changed over the years but key roles were played with a distinct absence of gorm. Poor Luise had hardly any lines but a lot of screen-time to fill. Mostly she filled it with an open mouthed passivity reminiscent of Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. The dialogue she did speak was delivered with a thick Germanic accent but who cares? It was foreign, wasn’t it?

Would Anna May Wong have made a better O-Lan than Rainer? Ever since Garbo stared into the cosmic distance on the prow of her ship in Queen Christina and achieved demi-god status, actresses have been trying for the same effect with differing results. No inner life but a beautiful, blank canvas onto which the audience projects the best of itself. It’s a seductive image. Who wouldn’t want to look like they have a hotline straight to god? Even I’ve tried it but failed to keep the requisite immobile face, not being particularly inscrutable, see? Rainer does this to perfection. For 143 straight minutes.

So this is how good Chinese women were portrayed during the heyday of Hollywood, when its movies described the world, laying out its cultural templates, and woe betide anyone who strayed from the Grand Design. I must have been asleep when they gave those lessons coz look at me now.

Anna May Wong was beautiful and authentically Chinese but she had far too much going on inside. Unless she blanded herself utterly, her natural charisma and thought-processes would have upset the symmetry and harmony of white folk’s art.

That‘s not to say the film isn’t worth seeing. If you can suspend disbelief at the racial origins of the actors, you can marvel at the sheer gorgeousness of Hollywood cinematography at its height. Something else Kevin Brownlow told me but we didn't have time to include in the final cut: how did the director achieve the amazing effect of vast clouds of locusts swarming across the Chinese landscape at the climax of the film? They turned the film upside down and placed a tank of water in front of it. Then, as the film was running, they poured coffee grounds into the tank so they swirled in dark clouds. Then they turned the film the right way and it looks as if tonnes of locust biomass is rising above puny humanity. Fantastic!

Madam Miaow says ...The Good Earth. Gorgeous looking but another set of invisible chains I can do without, thank you very much.

The Good Earth — directed by Sidney Franklin, Victor Fleming (uncredited) and Gustav Machaty

Anna Chen writes and presents Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly, broadcast BBC Radio 4 11:30am Tuesday 13th January 2009. Listen again online for seven days after transmission.

The Wicker Man review: guest post by Babeuf

Have you ever had one of those moments when suddenly you realise you’ve been following the wrong rule book? You think you're playing one game, but then you see you’re caught up in something very different? And maybe something much darker than you’d imagined. You’ve been pouring your energy, intellect or emotions into one task, only to find that someone higher up has been redirecting your efforts towards other ends.

Officer Kujan, in The Usual Suspects, reaches this point: having teased out the long, complex story from “Verbal” Kint, he releases his witness, only to discover, moments too late, that Kint was not a witness but Keyser Soze, the perpetrator himself. The scales fall from our eyes simultaneously, as we survey the notice board together with Kujan and see how Kint had improvised his yarn from the names of people and places he’d seen there. As listeners, we undergo a similar experience in the course of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony. A banal little tune enters in the middle of the first movement, but as the repetitions continue obsessively, and as the orchestration thickens and darkens, the horror of the situation dawns on us: banality is united with the horror of a war of annihilation in the form of the Nazi war machine, which had advanced through Russia and reached the outskirts of Leningrad by the time the symphony was broadcast in the streets of the besieged city.

Sergeant Howie, the luckless, repressed protagonist of The Wicker Man, experiences this lurch too. And even ends up in the costume of a fool to drive the point home. But once his eyes are opened, he has to be sacrificed. Religious reasons, of course – like people who know too much can say some very awkward things for those whose power depends on the success of their lies.

It all looked very different at the start. We thought we knew what the game was: a detective suspense movie. Howie thought he knew what his job was: to fly over to Summerisle, find the missing girl, or her corpse, and to catch the kidnappers or murderers (yes, yes, Sassenach reader, I know how you love to hear “murrdurr”, and you’ll get a year’s supply in The Wicker Man). But all along the way he’s stonewalled by the islanders – even the girl’s own mother – and good leads turn into red herrings. Even the bedrock of his assumptions, that there actually was a missing girl, turns out to be another illusion, and Howie finally sees that the game really revolves around him instead, because he has already been chosen as the sacrificial victim even before he came to Summerisle.

And we, as careful and critical viewers, congratulate ourselves on noticing that there’s another game in motion, namely the friction between two utterly different moral outlooks. On the one side, we have the pursed lips and raised eyebrows of Howie’s uptight Christianity, exchanging six days of self-denial and repression for the austere, whitewashed pleasures of his hymn-singing and bible reading. And on the other side, the obvious attractions of the islanders’ way of life, their freedom to follow their pleasures without shame, mediated by rituals that have so much more colour and mystery than anything in Howie’s repertoire. So we know which side we’re on.

OK, we’re with the islanders and against Howie. Except. Child sacrifice. Now that’s difficult to swallow. Call it the anthropologist’s dilemma: you don’t want to claim your Western values are universal, so you refuse to pass judgement on the morals and practises of other societies. Until you hit something like this that you ... just ... can’t ... bring yourself ... to accept. But, you say, let’s make a slight adjustment to the game – we’re playing moral dilemmas now. Tougher terrain, but still familiar, the very stuff of good drama.

Now here’s where I’m going to part company with everyone else (and possibly even with the director and the author of the screenplay, going by the interviews they’ve given). Because I want to show why the moral-dilemma game is just as much a red herring as the detective game. When Samuel P. Huntington tells us that the key to wars and cold wars is the “clash of civilisations” we rightly ask whether we’re being taken for fools. Does the seven-figure death toll in Iraq really stem from some primeval tectonic friction between “Western” and “Muslim” “civilisations”? How sordid of us to drag Huntington’s pristine account of cultural history down to the level of strategic control of oil reserves.

If we can reject the “Clash of Civilisations” as the ultimate ground of explanation (and justification) for world conflict, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to see that there should be something beyond the clash between Howie’s Christianity and Summerisle’s paganism. Especially when all the information we need is contained within the film. The centrepiece is the scene where Howie visits the castle, and finally meets Lord Summerisle face to face. After toying with Howie and mocking his beliefs, Summerisle turns serious and offers Howie a very candid explanation for the islanders' ways:

In the last century, the islanders were starving. Like our neighbours today, they were scratching a bare subsistence from sheep and sea. Then in 1868, my grandfather bought this barren island and began to change things. A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, freethinker. ... What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream that surrounded it. You see, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he’d developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work.

So the pioneering grandfather was an enlightened man of science. Then why did he bring a new religion to the island? Couldn’t he share his “freethinking” with the inhabitants?

The best way of accomplishing this – so it seemed to him – was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods. And that as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruit suited to local conditions.

Summerisle is holding back a little here. The grandfather’s scientific knowledge could have been taught to the islanders, and “the joyous old gods” would have been redundant. But if the islanders had the science, then the scientist himself would have become redundant. So the scientist had to transform himself into a priest in order to maintain his power over the islanders (his life of leisure, his servants and his fine castle), replacing the island’s ministers, who’d been scared off in the meantime:

Well, of course, to begin with they worked for him because he fed and clothed them, but later when the trees started fruiting, it became a very different matter, and the ministers fled the island, never to return. What my grandfather had started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way: to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods; to love nature, and to fear it – and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary.

So if Summerisle’s own words tell us most of what we need to know, why have they been overlooked? Or at best seen as marginalia, while the culture clash is seen as central? When we hear these words, our sympathies still lie firmly with the islanders and their pagan beliefs, which seem liberating in contrast to Howie’s Christianity, and this allows the material underpinnings of the island’s cult to pass us by. A little later, the brief flashbacks to Summerisle’s monologue focus precisely on the lines that don’t contextualise the cult, leading us astray again.

But the final exchange between Summerisle and Howie forces us to confront the reality behind the culture clash, not as some discursive intrusion, but now integrated into the dramatic situation, Alongside Howie, we finally realise what Summerisle had planned all along. A defeated but defiant Howie, in his last words to Summerisle, says that the sacrifice – of Howie himself – will only buy Summerisle another year. Summerisle knows this, but the islanders don't ... yet.

Your crops failed because your strains failed. Fruit is not meant to be grown on these islands – it’s against nature. Well don’t you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples? Summerisle, you know it won’t. ... Don’t you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you’re going to have to have another blood sacrifice. And next year, no-one less than the king of Summerisle himself will do. When the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day.

The arrogance and contempt drain from Summerisle’s face, and he can’t bring himself to look at Howie – not from guilt, but fear, since he knows Howie is speaking the truth. This, at last gives us a perspective that takes us outside the problems we'd thought the film was engaged with, and offers us an understanding both of the facts and the morality of what we’ve seen.

For so long as it appeared to be a tale of conflicting world views, the film latched on to contemporary cultural and moral debates; but now that we’ve outgrown that opposition, let’s see what the film can tell us about the world then (and today). The imagery of people being burnt to death was at the time most clearly associated with the war on the people of Vietnam (and Cambodia, and Laos). The real representative of our rulers in all their horror turns out to be Summerisle, not Howie – the same laird we were earlier invited to see as a benign, even liberating patriarch. The wicker-man sacrifice shows him flailing out with violence to stave off the disaster that awaits him, just as the US ruling class set South-East Asia alight rather than face up to its own inescapable economic and social problems. But the ultimate failure of the Summerisle agricultural experiment after three human generations – “it’s against nature”, as Howie says – also points to fears over the unsustainability of the industrialised world, fears that were beginning to emerge in popular consciousness when the film was released, and which we have all the more reason to heed today.

As the system begins to collapse, our rulers and owners, who maintain it in their interests, will sooner sacrifice ever more human lives rather than loosen their grasp on the source of their profits. They know this can’t save them in the long run, but so long as they think it will postpone their day of reckoning, they’ll continue to feed the flames with human bodies. And they’ll continue to use their house-trained journalists, academics and clerics to wrap up murder so that it looks grand and right.


by Babeuf

The Wicker Man review: guest post by Babeuf

Have you ever had one of those moments when suddenly you realise you’ve been following the wrong rule book? You think you're playing one game, but then you see you’re caught up in something very different? And maybe something much darker than you’d imagined. You’ve been pouring your energy, intellect or emotions into one task, only to find that someone higher up has been redirecting your efforts towards other ends.

Officer Kujan, in The Usual Suspects, reaches this point: having teased out the long, complex story from “Verbal” Kint, he releases his witness, only to discover, moments too late, that Kint was not a witness but Keyser Soze, the perpetrator himself. The scales fall from our eyes simultaneously, as we survey the notice board together with Kujan and see how Kint had improvised his yarn from the names of people and places he’d seen there. As listeners, we undergo a similar experience in the course of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony. A banal little tune enters in the middle of the first movement, but as the repetitions continue obsessively, and as the orchestration thickens and darkens, the horror of the situation dawns on us: banality is united with the horror of a war of annihilation in the form of the Nazi war machine, which had advanced through Russia and reached the outskirts of Leningrad by the time the symphony was broadcast in the streets of the besieged city.

Sergeant Howie, the luckless, repressed protagonist of The Wicker Man, experiences this lurch too. And even ends up in the costume of a fool to drive the point home. But once his eyes are opened, he has to be sacrificed. Religious reasons, of course – like people who know too much can say some very awkward things for those whose power depends on the success of their lies.

It all looked very different at the start. We thought we knew what the game was: a detective suspense movie. Howie thought he knew what his job was: to fly over to Summerisle, find the missing girl, or her corpse, and to catch the kidnappers or murderers (yes, yes, Sassenach reader, I know how you love to hear “murrdurr”, and you’ll get a year’s supply in The Wicker Man). But all along the way he’s stonewalled by the islanders – even the girl’s own mother – and good leads turn into red herrings. Even the bedrock of his assumptions, that there actually was a missing girl, turns out to be another illusion, and Howie finally sees that the game really revolves around him instead, because he has already been chosen as the sacrificial victim even before he came to Summerisle.

And we, as careful and critical viewers, congratulate ourselves on noticing that there’s another game in motion, namely the friction between two utterly different moral outlooks. On the one side, we have the pursed lips and raised eyebrows of Howie’s uptight Christianity, exchanging six days of self-denial and repression for the austere, whitewashed pleasures of his hymn-singing and bible reading. And on the other side, the obvious attractions of the islanders’ way of life, their freedom to follow their pleasures without shame, mediated by rituals that have so much more colour and mystery than anything in Howie’s repertoire. So we know which side we’re on.

OK, we’re with the islanders and against Howie. Except. Child sacrifice. Now that’s difficult to swallow. Call it the anthropologist’s dilemma: you don’t want to claim your Western values are universal, so you refuse to pass judgement on the morals and practises of other societies. Until you hit something like this that you ... just ... can’t ... bring yourself ... to accept. But, you say, let’s make a slight adjustment to the game – we’re playing moral dilemmas now. Tougher terrain, but still familiar, the very stuff of good drama.

Now here’s where I’m going to part company with everyone else (and possibly even with the director and the author of the screenplay, going by the interviews they’ve given). Because I want to show why the moral-dilemma game is just as much a red herring as the detective game. When Samuel P. Huntington tells us that the key to wars and cold wars is the “clash of civilisations” we rightly ask whether we’re being taken for fools. Does the seven-figure death toll in Iraq really stem from some primeval tectonic friction between “Western” and “Muslim” “civilisations”? How sordid of us to drag Huntington’s pristine account of cultural history down to the level of strategic control of oil reserves.

If we can reject the “Clash of Civilisations” as the ultimate ground of explanation (and justification) for world conflict, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to see that there should be something beyond the clash between Howie’s Christianity and Summerisle’s paganism. Especially when all the information we need is contained within the film. The centrepiece is the scene where Howie visits the castle, and finally meets Lord Summerisle face to face. After toying with Howie and mocking his beliefs, Summerisle turns serious and offers Howie a very candid explanation for the islanders' ways:

In the last century, the islanders were starving. Like our neighbours today, they were scratching a bare subsistence from sheep and sea. Then in 1868, my grandfather bought this barren island and began to change things. A distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, freethinker. ... What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream that surrounded it. You see, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he’d developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work.

So the pioneering grandfather was an enlightened man of science. Then why did he bring a new religion to the island? Couldn’t he share his “freethinking” with the inhabitants?

The best way of accomplishing this – so it seemed to him – was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods. And that as a result of this worship, the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruit suited to local conditions.

Summerisle is holding back a little here. The grandfather’s scientific knowledge could have been taught to the islanders, and “the joyous old gods” would have been redundant. But if the islanders had the science, then the scientist himself would have become redundant. So the scientist had to transform himself into a priest in order to maintain his power over the islanders (his life of leisure, his servants and his fine castle), replacing the island’s ministers, who’d been scared off in the meantime:

Well, of course, to begin with they worked for him because he fed and clothed them, but later when the trees started fruiting, it became a very different matter, and the ministers fled the island, never to return. What my grandfather had started out of expediency, my father continued out of love. He brought me up the same way: to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods; to love nature, and to fear it – and to rely on it and to appease it where necessary.

So if Summerisle’s own words tell us most of what we need to know, why have they been overlooked? Or at best seen as marginalia, while the culture clash is seen as central? When we hear these words, our sympathies still lie firmly with the islanders and their pagan beliefs, which seem liberating in contrast to Howie’s Christianity, and this allows the material underpinnings of the island’s cult to pass us by. A little later, the brief flashbacks to Summerisle’s monologue focus precisely on the lines that don’t contextualise the cult, leading us astray again.

But the final exchange between Summerisle and Howie forces us to confront the reality behind the culture clash, not as some discursive intrusion, but now integrated into the dramatic situation, Alongside Howie, we finally realise what Summerisle had planned all along. A defeated but defiant Howie, in his last words to Summerisle, says that the sacrifice – of Howie himself – will only buy Summerisle another year. Summerisle knows this, but the islanders don't ... yet.

Your crops failed because your strains failed. Fruit is not meant to be grown on these islands – it’s against nature. Well don’t you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples? Summerisle, you know it won’t. ... Don’t you understand that if your crops fail this year, next year you’re going to have to have another blood sacrifice. And next year, no-one less than the king of Summerisle himself will do. When the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day.

The arrogance and contempt drain from Summerisle’s face, and he can’t bring himself to look at Howie – not from guilt, but fear, since he knows Howie is speaking the truth. This, at last gives us a perspective that takes us outside the problems we'd thought the film was engaged with, and offers us an understanding both of the facts and the morality of what we’ve seen.

For so long as it appeared to be a tale of conflicting world views, the film latched on to contemporary cultural and moral debates; but now that we’ve outgrown that opposition, let’s see what the film can tell us about the world then (and today). The imagery of people being burnt to death was at the time most clearly associated with the war on the people of Vietnam (and Cambodia, and Laos). The real representative of our rulers in all their horror turns out to be Summerisle, not Howie – the same laird we were earlier invited to see as a benign, even liberating patriarch. The wicker-man sacrifice shows him flailing out with violence to stave off the disaster that awaits him, just as the US ruling class set South-East Asia alight rather than face up to its own inescapable economic and social problems. But the ultimate failure of the Summerisle agricultural experiment after three human generations – “it’s against nature”, as Howie says – also points to fears over the unsustainability of the industrialised world, fears that were beginning to emerge in popular consciousness when the film was released, and which we have all the more reason to heed today.

As the system begins to collapse, our rulers and owners, who maintain it in their interests, will sooner sacrifice ever more human lives rather than loosen their grasp on the source of their profits. They know this can’t save them in the long run, but so long as they think it will postpone their day of reckoning, they’ll continue to feed the flames with human bodies. And they’ll continue to use their house-trained journalists, academics and clerics to wrap up murder so that it looks grand and right.


by Babeuf

Movie watch: 55 Days At Peking

I suppose I should be breaking out the Mao Tai and celebrating in style as this glorious annus mirabilis of the Beijing Olympics is, so I'm told, my year.

And about time, too. After a lifetime of invisibility and stuck with a status somewhere between ninja manicurist and evil opium warlord, British Born and Anglo Chinese like me are set to be in yer face for the whole of 2008.

This means the TV schedulers, lazy and stoopid, falling over themselves to make the most of this ready-made theme, and dusting off the archives for repeat heaven. Yes, an hour after you've seen one, you'll be wanting another.

Already this week we've had the rarely aired Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing from the book by Han Suyin, and today, at nearly three hours but feeling like the entire eight weeks, 55 Days At Peking, a cold-war era jingoistic wet dream starring skullhead Charlton Heston, he of the "cold dead hand" and hero of the US gun lobby.

As there'll be lots of this rubbish coming thick and fast with no taste and discrimination exercised (oh, okay, lots of discrimination but not exactly the way I wished) you'll be needing a bit of orientation (har, har) around the subject.

Cometh the hour, cometh the blog - I guess that's me, then.

So ...

55 Days At Peking, directed by Nicholas Ray who should've known better and was sacked from the job for his pains. (And briefly seen in a cameo role as the wheelchair-bound American ambassador.)

Set in 1900, 55 Days purports to tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion, when indiginous Chinese made a last effort to get the rapacious foreign powers out of their own country. Eleven imperialist nations occupied major chunks of China with 13 out of 18 Chinese provinces under foreign control. The diplomats found themselves holed up in the Peking legation compound awaiting relief by their armies with nothing but Chuck Heston's US Major Lewis, David Niven's Sir Arthur Robertson, and Ava Gardner's Baroness Natasha Ivanoff (as the romantic interest) between them and the Yellow nightmare.

Now I know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but it is interesting to unpack the process by which a noble aim is turned into an evil act, and heroes made villains.

The only background you get to the rebellion is when the opening narration tells us that 100 million Chinese are hungry and that the famine is fanning the winds of discontent. Nothing else. Nothing about the British Opium Wars from 1839 when, as top dog in the imperialist pack, Britain transformed what had been an upper class vice in China into a nationwide calamity when they forced China to import cheap Bengal opium to offset the crippling balance of trade, with such august institutions as the Midlands Bank (now HSBC) and the East India Trade Company helping to bring China to its knees.

The perfectly fair statement by sinister wily Prince Tuan (Robert Helpmann) that, if the Chinese Boxer rebels destroy the foreign forces, it shows that China is no longer helpless; "It will be the beginning of freedom," is turned on its head.

This laudable objective is undermined by the constant reminder that these heathens, being subhuman and degenerate, have no right to the same treasured rights as you and me. OK, maybe not me, 'cause I'm a sinister wily oriental, but you get my drift.

So off we go on a trip showing us exactly how lowly and undeserving the antagonists are. We know that one of the themes of the film is what makes a person "whole" and what is incomplete; what is human and what is Other. To the injured Mancunian squaddie lying in the makeshift hospital, the prospect of losing his leg terrifies him as the worst thing in the world: "I don't want to live as half a man," he begs.

And here they are, surrounded and about to be swamped by such half-men.

To the Chinese of this world, life is not valued except in cash terms; a Chinese life is worth 20 dollars, while the tortured English priest is priced at 40 dollars. Interestingly, the priest is strapped crucifix-style to a water wheel by sinister wily Chinese Boxers (this is Christian values under assault by pagan scum, after all), and plunged into the water until he drowns. Not like waterboarding, then, as used by the CIA.

The sinister pitiless Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, played by Flora Robson, orders two lots of unjust executions. General Yung Lo (Leo Genn) attempts to halt the first in his best British thesp accent, the execution of a Chinese Colonel who has tried to impose order on Prince Tuan's favoured Boxers. Despite his superior argument, having a somewhat rational western mind to go with his perfect diction, she insists the victim be executed for the petty "crime" of making them quarrel.

The second incident is a mass beheading of Boxers who have just carried out the killing of the German minister at the behest of fiendish Prince Tuan. They may be ours, but even our friends are expendible. The Dowager Empress tells Sir Arthur, "Chinese justice is swift and thorough." To which he replies, "Where's the guilt - those who wield the sword, or those who give the command?" because the British care about these things, and Sir Arthur, such a delicate civilised soul, is shocked despite being a military man. (Ask Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan until he tried to put these principles into practice.)

Of course the Brits never carried out executions and massacres, did they? Amritsar is a whole 19 years in the future, and they ruled Empire with kid gloves. Yeah, right.

The Brits have much to teach: "China is learning new arts of peace from the West." And then watch how Sir Arthur's oily charm delivers a threat as a compliment. Having contemptuously kicked away the cushion on which he is expected to kneel in the Imperial court, he tells the Dowager Empress, "China's greatest virtue is her patience. ... If not, then the blood of millions will be shed."

He continues; "I have come here with the Truth." Being a heathen, she tells him, "We reject your truth," and orders them all to leave the country. Ooh, now we're not even occupying the same world of perception. We ain't in Kansas any more.

Meanwhile, as the Boxers are marauding, "killing every white man" and Chinese Christians in numbers that I am guessing would be dwarfed if Britain plunges the country into a major armed conflict, the westerners are humanised and made compassionate and worthy of compassion at every opportunity. Ye gods, how different these big-nose white devil invaders are. They care about the enemy as well as their own side, they introspect, they question themselves, they have God on their side.

Major Lewis urges his men to treat the Chinese as human; "Pay your money and don't expect any free samples."

In turn, Major Lewis is reprimanded by Sir Arthur for the death of the Boxer - who was about to shoot Lewis dead.

Fearful that her injured son - the little innocent Tommy - is somewhere in "An enormous, empty Chinese limbo," Lady Sarah Robertson crumples while her man grapples with the Big Questions; Whose ambitions is he serving? Who gains? How many children must die? Well may he ask. Sir Arthur's rather anodyne conclusion is, "The pain is not yours alone," and he is rewarded with the observation by his wife that "Only an honest man would ask such a question." These are, after all, the marks of the civilised man.

And these civilised men have no defences against the barbarism waiting outside the compound except for their books piled and squeezed into makeshift barricades.

"Don't go through there, Ma'am," the young soldier advises the Baroness just before he is cruelly cut down by a sniper. "There are Chinese on the other side." There are, actually, Chinese on both sides, but who's counting?

All the representatives of the foreign powers are thus depicted as human, rounded, full with an inner life. Even the bloody Japanese officer, Colonel Shiba, is played by a proper Japanese actor (the "delicious", according to some, Juzo Itami) who happens to be dashingly attractive unlike the wily sinister Chinese. Did the filmmakers not understand Japanese history in China? Good grief!

There are good Chinese, though, represented by the mixed race Teresa, a pretty eleven year old daughter of a US captain and a Chinese woman, now dead. Teresa has been deposited in a Chinese orphanage for the duration, where she seems to have no relation to her peers, but pines for her white daddy who has promised to take her back "home" to Illinois. She lives for his rare appearances in Peking but, unbeknown to her, Daddy is having second thoughts. He tells Major Lewis, "They'd treat her like a freak back home." Lewis agrees; she is "better off with her own kind, " even though she has no mother.

When Captain Marshall - her father - dies, Major Lewis is transformed from a soldier merely doing his job into the father of the spirit of the new post-imperial China as embodied by Teresa; the good, free, non-threatening Chinese spawned by our side (again, not me, but, you know ...). As the priest tells Lewis, "The only language a child understands - love. Every man is the father of every child."

Only two years before making this film, Heston was again transformed, this time in El Cid, from man into myth, when his cold dead corpse is strapped to his horse and sent flying through the enemy, scattering them and winning Spain from the swarthy heathen scum. Chuck's good at these roles.

So, there you have it. China as a pretty loveable malleable child in need of rescue by the paternal force of US imperialism. At the end, as Lewis is riding out of the city at the head of his troops, he bends down to Teresa: "Here, take my hand". And she rides off on the back of his horse - presumably into a future where she'll learn fast, trounce him at manufacturing, and poison his dogs and his kids with tainted pet-food, toothpaste and leaded toys. Heh, heh! And serves him right.

Don't ask me about the Ava Gardner/Baroness Natasha Ivanoff storyline with its diamond necklace MacGuffin thread that goes nowhere. The budding romance between her and the Major is strangely underdeveloped with more passion occurring between ol' granite-jaw and Sir Arthur, than with her. (Appropriate, though, as the British Foreign Office has always had the experience and the brutality to keep one of the biggest empires afloat and has played a leading backroom role in US adventures. Don't forget Britain's little lesson with the dodgy dossier and Niger uranium when the nature of the US/British relationship came to light.)

As soon as she admits to shagging a Chinese General you know she's doomed. And, indeed, she dies from a Boxer bullet while performing heroics and bringing opiates for the wounded and fruit for the children. How’s this for classic dialogue?

“I want the drugs and a wagonload of fruit for the children.”

Hmm, recreation and roughage - just my sort of heroine. Or heroin. Which is why it was an eleven year old girl on the back of the Major's horse and not the glamorous transgressive Baroness. The tabloids would have a field day - unpack that, Rebecca Wade!

On one level, 55 Days is just another siege movie. It could have been cowboys against Indians, or plantation owners versus African tribes. Here it's brave white soldiers versus the yellow hordes and their fiendish wave attacks representing the hostile Other.

On another, it's a 1963 Cold War epic set on dehumanising an ideological enemy in crude terms.

It boggles my fine mind to think that as recently as 1963, when this ponderous bit of colonialist propaganda was made, Hollywood was still putting western actors in yellow-face and epicanthic eyelids.

In the villains' corner, Flora Robson, who has one of the biggest schnozzles in cinematic history, is the cunning and sinister Dowager Empress, Chinese not being best known for noses the size of Beachy Head. Arch fiend Prince Tuan is played by the ballet maestro Robert Helpmann with an accent ... what the hell was that accent? A eunochoidal RADA twang via Widow Twanky.

However, the more human the character (read - sympathetic to the cause of the white westerners), the less their vowels were in an uproar. Hence, Leo Genn's General Yung Lo, who wants to curb the Boxers, is allowed to thesp away like a Saturday matinee in Leatherhead.

Finally, that opium.

The doctor struggles to look after the wounded with no alcohol, iodine or painkillers. They are "back in the dark ages".

The Doctor Han tells the Baroness, now working selflessly as his nurse, "We are in the land of opium and there are no opiates."

Perhaps he should have asked his dealer. I would have tried Sir Arthur, myself. He looks like a man who knows.

Channel 5 followed 55 Days with a Jackie Chan movie. This was not adequate compensation.

A big thank you to Babeuf for enduring this pomp-fest with me and who will have a thing or two to say about The King And I ...