Under Suspicion - 1991 film review

There's more than one film called Under Suspicion, and the 1991 movie was unknown to me before it cropped up on Talking Pictures TV. The cast looked promising, so I decided to give it a go, even though a quick glance on the internet indicated that some reviewers really didn't like the movie. I'm glad I watched it, since although the script tests our suspension of disbelief to the limits, the overall style of the film is engaging.

The setting is Brighton at the end of the 1950s. Liam Neeson is Tony Aaron, an ex-cop who is struggling to earn a crust as a seedy private eye. His main source of income is divorce work. He persuades clients who want a divorce to go to a hotel room with his attractive wife (Maggie O'Neill) and then bursts into the room and photographs them in bed together. One day, things go terribly wrong. The client and his wife have been murdered.

The client turns out to have been a painter called Stasio. He'd left his wife (Alphonsia Emmanuel) for a model called Angeline (Laura San Giacomo) and his lawyer (the always reliable Stephen Moore, who sadly died a couple of years back) reveals that he'd changed his will on the day of his death, disinheriting his wife in favour of Angeline. But some evidence points to Tony as the guilty party. Can he establish his innocence? Even his closest pal (Kenneth Cranham, playing a less menacing character than usual) has his doubts.

The locations in Brighton are atmospherically portrayed and it was great to see the Portmeirion Hotel masquerading as Stasio's posh mansion. There are some unlikely developments in the plot, but the pace and acting (a prosecution barrister is played by Alex Norton, better known as Burke in Taggart) are both good. It's a sort of British version of a Chandleresque mystery, and despite its limitations, it's decent entertainment.  

Mr Jones - 2019 film review

Mr Jones is a film from three years ago, a historical thriller based on a true story concerning a cover-up in Moscow of terrible events in Ukraine. Sound familiar? It is chilling that, we are now witnessing the appalling impact of a present day Russian invasion of the same country. The circumstances are different, but I think that recent events make this film even more interesting than it was at the time of its release.

To my shame, I'd never heard of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones whose courageous exposure of the truth about life in Stalin's empire caused consternation in the Thirties. In all honesty, I was attracted to the film because Jones is played by James Norton, a brilliant actor whose versatility I admire. The cast also includes Vanessa Kirby, Fenella Woolgar, Peter Sarsgaard (very good here) and the consistently excellent Kenneth Cranham, playing David Lloyd George.

Jones is a brilliant journalist - and linguist - who has, when the action starts, already interviewed Hitler. He has the idea of interviewing Stalin, whom many people in the West believed at that time was creating a glorious new society. Once Jones gets to Moscow, and meets the dodgy Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, a Kremlin apologist played by Sarsgaard, he starts to wonder if everything is really as it seems. A traumatic trip to Ukraine reveals many horrors, which he is determined to bring to light.

The film is excellent in many ways, but the pace does flag at times. A story as good as this deserves a really sharp script. Given the emphasis placed on the notion that 'there is only one truth', it's also rather disconcerting to learn just how much of the film is invented. George Orwell, who plays a part in the story, never met Jones, while some of the incidents in Ukraine appear never to have happened. I understand why film-makers make stuff up, even in stories based on real life, but I'm not convinced some of the embellishments were necessary. But what matters most is that this is a powerful story. It certainly made me think.

In Praise of Inside No. 9

The fifth series of BBC 2's Inside No. 9 ended last night with another twisty black comedy, the cleverly titled Stakeout. Until a few weeks ago, I'd never watched this series, written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. but an article in the Sunday Times prompted my interest by drawing a comparison with Tales of the Unexpected, a highly popular anthology series in its day which featured some good stories and some good actors (plus great opening titles and theme music!), even though when you watch it now, some of the episodes seem very dated.

So I took a look, and soon I was hooked. Binge-watching is something I rarely do, since there is never enough time, given all the writing projects I have on the go, but the irresistible appeal of Inside No. 9 meant I changed my ways. Thanks to iPlayer, I've now watched every episode and they have left me lost in admiration of the brilliance of the storylines. Pemberton and Shearsmith are also accomplished and versatile actors, who take key roles in every episode, and the quality of the scripts attracts actors ranging from Kenneth Cranham and David Morrissey to Felicity Kendal and Sheridan Smith. But in this post I'd like to focus on the quality of their writing. It's so good that I want to watch each episode all over again, to appreciate more fully the subtleties of the scripts.

Inside No. 9 is really unclassifiable. Its defining features include dark (sometimes very dark) humour and startling plot twists, as well as claustrophobic settings linked (often tenuously, but that doesn't matter) by the number 9: a police car, an art gallery, a house where the owners are about to move, and so on. Fawlty Towers, Jonathan Creek and some episodes of Blackadder - three of my all-time favourite witty TV shows - illustrated the potential of a tightly confined setting, and Inside No. 9 rings the changes with extraordinary flair.

It's not a crime series, and the emotions evoked by the stories (as with The 12 Days of Christine, a terrific vehicle for Sheridan Smith) vary widely, but as you would expect, tropes from fiction's most popular genre often feature. One character in Stakeout made fun of the familiar ingredients of cop shows, although of course the pay-off was not what we'd been led to expect. This ability to keep confounding expectations is one of the hallmarks of high calibre writing, whether your name is Shakespeare, Dickens, or (yes!) Agatha Christie or Anthony Horowitz; and Pemberton and Shearsmith are first-rate writers. One episode I admired enormously, Once Removed, is a superb example of reverse chronology, a technique very difficult to master. Another is a story about a burglary with no dialogue. Hotel Zanzibar is a nod to Shakespearean comedy and the characters speak in iambic pentameter. 

Private View is a take on And Then There Were None, with a pastiche of Theatre of Blood thrown in. (Incidentally, the sheer number of contemporary stories which use the And Then There Were None tropes shows the depth of the impression Christie's novel has made on our culture). Even better was The Riddle of the Sphinx, in which crosswords and word play feature, before a truly shocking finale. And then there is Misdirection, possibly my absolute favourite episode (though how can one choose from such riches?), a brilliant updating of the John Dickson Carr/Clayton Rawson kind of conjuring trick mystery. If Pemberton and Shearsmith wrote detective novels, they would be huge stars in our firmament. I doubt they have many ambitions in that direction, but it's our loss.

I could go on and on, but you've got the picture. I've become a huge fan of Pemberton and Shearsmith as writers - and as I say, I'm also impressed by the range of their acting (I mentioned Shearsmith's performance in The Widower on this blog six years ago). I can't wait for the next series.

Closed Circuit - film review

Conspiracy thrillers, rather like conspiracy theories themselves, range from the frighteningly plausible to the plain silly. Closed Circuit is a 2013 conspiracy thriller movie which has not, as far as I can see, pleased too many critics. But I think the panning it's received in some quarters is far too harsh. I found it very watchable. And not just because the story featured a solicitor called Devlin and a heroic lawyer called Martin!

The cast is very good, and several of its members are in excellent form. Rebecca Hall, who seldom seems to put a foot wrong, is convincing as a committed barrister, and Kenneth Cranham exudes a subdued version of his characteristic menace in his role as a judge. Ciaran Hinds plays the dodgy Devlin, Jim Broadbent excels as the slimy attorney general, and although I don't think Eric Bana is in quite the same league, he's not at all bad as the arrogant barrister Martin who grows as a character as he stumbles across evidence of dirty tricks at the heart of the establishment.

The film begins with a bang, as an explosion rips apart Borough Market, but the story begins in earnest some months later, with the trial of the alleged ringleader of the shadowy group of terrorists who were responsible. Because some of the evidence has national security implications, the rules require a defence barrister who handles the case in open court, and a special defence counsel who deals with the secret information. Bana takes over the former role when his predecessor commits suicide, and the first of many complications is that he is the former lover of the special counsel, played by Hall.

I think some of the criticism of the film stems from disappointment about the relatively superficial nature of the film's focus on the surveillance state. As a critique of government and the security services, it's so-so. But judged as a thriller, I think it works well. The pace is good throughout, the twists pleasing, and the storyline reasonably distinctive. Of course, you have to suspend your disbelief, but I was happy to do just that. An under-rated film, which offers well-made entertainment.

Layer Cake

I like good gangster movies, but mediocre ones can be very tedious – and the really good ones are rather thin on the ground. So I approached the film of J.J. Connolly’s book Layer Cake with some trepidation, drawn as much by the fact that it starred the excellent Daniel Craig as by optimism that I’d enjoy the story.

But enjoy it I did – very much. In fact, Layer Cake now lines up alongside Get Carter, The Long Good Friday and The Italian Job as one of my absolute favourite British gangster films. Craig is predictably cool and classy in the lead role, but he is assisted by a first rate cast which includes, as senior Bad Guys, those fine actors Kenneth Cranham and Michael Gambon, both of whom perform with gusto.

The plot is complex – multi-layered like some cakes, in fact. Briefly, Craig is planning to retire young to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, but a hapless henchman called Duke lands him in the mire by stealing a vast quantity of drugs from some seriously menacing Serbian villains, while Craig finds it impossible to keep both Cranham and Gambon off his back. There are some very violent moments, which are not for the faint-hearted – Cranford this is not! - but also some very funny lines and scenes.

Craig moves smoothly from one messy situation to another, pausing only (though this is entirely understandable, I think) to pick up Sienna Miller, who dumps Duke’s unstable nephew, with consequences that in the end prove very unfortunate. I liked the pace and twists of the story-line, and as long as you don’t mind violence and bad language, this is a film that can definitely be recommended.