TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols This novel, about a boy’s consequential bonds with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, is a call to conscience and connection. feeds.nytimes.com |
Word Made Flesh Questions for, quibbles with and tributes to the sometimes inscrutable protagonist of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. feeds.nytimes.com |
Geoff Dyer on Where Eagles Dare Brian G Hutton, 1968I keep waiting for the day when Where Eagles Dare begins to pall. I mean, how many films can stand up to multiple viewings over such a vast span of time (about 40 years)? In fact, the opposite seems to be happening – it gets better, yields deeper layers of meaning, every time I see it.Adapted from the novel by EM Forster… no, hang on, that's Where Angels Fear to Tread, but there's a point to be made here. Where Eagles Dare is a great title, anticipating the widespread popularity of the SAS motto "Who Dares Wins", even though it was made years before the storming of the Iranian embassy in 1980, of which the film could be seen either as a prophetic allegory or a direct inspiration. And the title is not just a sonorous bit of rhetoric plucked from Shakespeare. No, the castle scaled by Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood et al is called the Schloss Adler, the Castle of the Eagles. So the title is literally true, thereby cleverly inverting or – as is said in the world of agents and double agents – "turning" the intended sense of the lines in Richard III: "The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch." How cool is that!I last watched Eagles the day after seeing Disgrace, the latter serving as a textbook demonstration of everything that is wrong with a certain kind of dutiful film-making. What a plod! JM Coetzee's great novel is ploddingly translated into a script that is in turn ploddingly transferred to celluloid. It's not a movie at all, it's a ploddie, whereas Eagles is a piece of perfect cinema, in that the script dissolves into the film. (Alistair MacLean wrote the script and then turned it into a novel.)But what a script it must have been! What a plot! How do people dream up twists and turns like that? The key turnaround comes in the castle's Great Hall and involves Burton crossing, double- and triple-bamboozling everyone in sight. In the script the dialogue was divvied up more evenly between Eastwood and Burton, but it ended up with Eastwood doing more of the shooting and Burton more of the talking. Good call. Burton admired Clint's "dynamic lethargy", but in this scene calls him a "punk – and a pretty second-rate punk at that". It's a devastating bit of verbal jujitsu since, effectively, Burton takes Eastwood's signature line – "Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" – and turns it back on him, before Clint's even landed the part of Dirty Harry.As for Burton, was he ever better than in Eagles? It's a masterly display of how to boss people around. Do this, do that! Everyone else – Mary Ure, the German agents, even Eastwood – they're all just Burton's bitches. Like all bossy people, Burton ultimately resorts to "I'd better do it myself" mode. So when the German agents kick Eastwood unconscious and escape by cable car, it's the ageing, alcoholic Welshman who jumps on the roof and settles their hash – big time! One gets an ice-axe in the arm, the other falls into the valley after clinging so desperately to one of Burton's legs that it must have ended up a foot longer. Naturally, it's Burton who drives the bus at the end – and even then he's still barking out orders: "Take out the control tower!"Clint and Mary duly obey. That's another forward-looking aspect of Eagles: from King Kong onwards the role of women was often just to swoon, scream, look threatened and, ideally, get their kit off; here Mary Ure blasts away with a machine gun like she's the Baader Meinhof Gang's Gudrun Ensslin. In fact, now I think about it, I see that the film is a premonitory account of the impending guerrilla war on the impregnable fortress of the German state apparatus with its concealed roots – all those twisting tunnels and corridors – in the Nazi past.In keeping with this, although the concealed intention of the mission is to weed out top-ranking double agents, its most immediate consequence is gratuitous murder and mayhem on a huge scale. They trash the schloss, wreck the surrounding infrastructure (the cable car is a write-off) and, by the end, are so addicted to the thrill of vandalism that, instead of driving politely through the entrance to the airfield, Baader – I mean Burton – smashes through the perimeter fence (I love the way it gets dragged along after the bus) before achieving the ultimate goal of any self-respecting 1970s terrorists: destroying some stationary planes.And here we get to the most intriguing paradox of the film. If Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it, then the writers, cast and crew of Eagles were secretly on the side of the Germans, whom they ostensibly outwit, terrorise and slay in large numbers. Everything in the film is German. It's practically an advert for the superiority of German manufacturing. They fly in and out on a Junkers Ju 52. They rely exclusively on German weaponry (predominantly the MP40 Schmeisser submachine pistol). We do not see a British gun until they're on the way home and Patrick Wymark pulls a Sten on Burton. And guess what: the firing pin's been removed – it doesn't frigging work. Finally, and most stylishly, the stars all wear German uniforms. How come Hugo Boss has not reissued those super-cool – ie cosy – retro winter anoraks? Vorsprung durch Technik!• Geoff Dyer is a novelist. His most recent book is Jeff in Venice, Death in VaranasiGeoff Dyerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Essay: Tintinabulation Thoughts on a stack of new books about Tintin and his creator, Hergé, a k a Georges Remi. feeds.nytimes.com |
Media Monkey: Kay Burley scribes 'Jilly Cooper crossed with The Thick Of It' Stand by your bookshelves – Sky News presenter Kay Burley has written a political bonkbuster described as "Jilly Cooper crossed with The Thick Of It". So that presumably means lots of f-words in all senses. The first of a two-book deal with publisher HarperCollins worth a "six-figure sum", apparently, it will be out in June 2011. "Kay has written a fantastically feisty blockbuster set in worlds she knows inside and out – television, magazines and British politics," HarperCollins deputy publishing director Sarah Ritherdon says on Bookseller.com. "What particularly set this book apart was the wonderfully strong portrayal of three formidable women, united in their love for one man, who just happens to be the prime minister, but soon set on a path of revenge. ." The book will tell the story of a "wildly popular prime minister" called Julian Jensen who is elected for a second term, only for the backstabbing to begin after a mid-term wobble. No clue on whether it will also include the inside track on a 24-hour news channel called, er, Eye News. Can't wait.Sky NewsBSkyBTelevision industryMonkeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |