Belle

The Crippen story has inspired many writers over the years, long before I wrote Dancing for the Hangman. One of the most remarkable fruits of that inspiration was a musical called Belle, alternatively titled The Ballad of Dr Crippen.

The music was written by Monty Norman, with a book by Wolf Mankowitz. It opened at the Strand Theatre on 4 May 1961, and managed a mere 44 performances before critical opprobrium killed it off. There was an outcry about bad taste, with the acerbic Bernard Levin in the vanguard. However, a CD of the show has been issued, and the notes claim that it ‘has to be one of the truly great British musicals, admirably incisive in its invention, wit and sympathy for its subject’.

The music hall style is not really to my taste, but the score does have verve, and it might be argued that the show was simply ahead of its time. The cast featured George Benson as Crippen (I remember him from countless TV comedy shows in the 60s), Rose Hill as his wife, and Virginia Vernon as Ethel Le Neve. There is a track listing on the Crippen page on my website.

I have managed to obtain a programme of the show, inscribed by Vernon. She was a pretty young actress who had already appeared in The Millionairess with Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, but her musical career ended with Belle. She married a comedian, Ben Warriss, and retired from the stage.

As for Norman, at least his music attracted the attention of the producer of a new spy film. And so it was that Norman was asked to write The James Bond Theme….

From Russia With Love

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched, at long last, the first three James Bond films. From Russia With Love was the follow-up to Dr No, and it introduced a number of trademark features, including a score by John Barry, and the debut of Desmond Llewellyn as Q, the technical wizard. Again, I thought the film had worn well, considering its age – thanks partly to the excellence of Sean Connery in the lead role, and largely to a tight and fast-moving screenplay, packed with incident.

In this movie, the villainous organisation SMERSH plays Russia off against Britain, and Bond is meant to be the fall guy. We don’t get to see the face of the evil mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but are allowed a few shots of him stroking a cat with gleeful menace. His henchman include Rosa Klebb (memorably played by the legendary Lotte Lenya), Walter Gotell, who regularly appeared on tv in my youth, and that notable tough guy actor Robert Shaw, who was born in Lancashire – though you’d never guess it from this performance. When one thinks of Shaw’s very different role in The Sting, one realises what a good actor he was, and apparently he was also a novelist of some distinction.

Pedro Armendariz, a Mexican actor, also had a key role in the story, as Ali Karim Bey, who assists Bond before falling victim to assassination by Shaw. I was sad to read that, while the film was being made, Armendariz was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that he committed suicide shortly after the film was completed. His performance in the movie is very likeable, and he is deservedly remembered for it.

As usual, I enjoyed the John Barry soundtrack. Monty Norman is credited, as usual, with writing the James Bond Theme itself. But, having failed to be commissioned to score the movie, he must have been further and very understandably irked to see his name misspelt on the final credits.

Dr No

Forty seven years after it was first screened, I’ve finally watched the first James Bond film, Dr No. And I have to say that I found it thoroughly enjoyable – in fact I was surprised at how modern it seemed.

One of the secrets of the film’s enormous success is that the screenplay is very taut. I was amazed to read on Wikipedia that Wolf Mankowitz, who was involved with the original version of the script, was so unhappy with it that he had his name removed from the credits. If true, it was weird judgment on Wolf’s part. One of the writers who was credited, incidentally, was the late Berkley Mather, a thriller writer who is now little remembered, but who was chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1966.-67.

Sean Connery immediately establishes himself here as the definitive Bond (though I admire Daniel Craig’s updated interpretation) and Ursula Andress is the definitive Bond girl -she also played Vesper Lynd in the spoof Bond movie Casino Royale, in 1967, inspiring Burt Bacharach’s classic melody ‘The Look of Love’. The eponymous villain is played by Joseph Wiseman, an actor I’ve never come across elsewhere. He portrays the bad guy bent on world domination as a kind of precursor of Gordon Brown, but with added charisma and bionic hands.

What of the music? The soundtrack was written by Monty Norman, who has won libel claims against those who allege that the great John Barry composed the ‘James Bond Theme’ rather than simply arranging it. I was fascinated to learn that Monty was chosen for the job because of a musical he had written called ‘Belle’ (with a book by Wolf Mankowitz – it’s a small world.) Belle was the stage version of the story of another villainous Doctor – Hawley Harvey Crippen. And the story of that musical deserves a blog post to itself, on another day.