*Track 20
Something Changed - 10th March 2019
It needed a huge leap of imagination to conflate Teresa May with Barbara Stanwyck (to start with only one of them could dance!). But somehow, with double illogicality, it was a chasm Stuart had managed to cross.
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Film noir was a term first coined in 1946, by French critic Nino Frank, to label a new genre of stylish crime movie, featuring cynical characters driven by sexual motivation. The phrase was initially ignored in America though, where, until the ‘70s, they stuck with a comfortably non-Francophile, if less evocative, categorisation of melodramas. So, ironically, for the whole time Hollywood was busy making a swathe of films now considered ‘film noir’ classics they had no idea that was what they were doing.
Stuart’s motive for investigating crime dramas was an article in The Independent’s Sunday supplement in which their feature writer, Graeme Ross, had picked his, “twenty greatest film noirs of the classic era.” As ever, Stuart was a sucker for a good list.
There were some fantastic films on Ross’s countdown, even if Stuart didn’t always agree with the way he had ordered them (which was part of the fun). For example ‘Touch of Evil’, Orson Welles’ late masterclass in the form, was insultingly lowly placed at eighteenth. Nearer the business end of Graeme’s list however, Stuart had found less to argue with, fully in agreement that three of the writer’s chosen top-four; ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (in fourth), ‘The Big Sleep’ (as his runner up) and ‘Double Indemnity’ (fittingly at the head of ‘affairs’) were all indisputable cinematic classics.
The directors of the four movies Stuart had chosen to focus on (Welles, Huston, Hawks, and Wilder) read like a ‘Who’s Who’ of Hollywood’s post-war glitterati, yet he still maintained that the bedrock on which any great film noir sat was the quality of its source material, the story it was based upon. Not so true for ‘Touch of Evil’ maybe (though its genius director also wrote the screenplay), but ‘The Big Sleep’ had been able to call on Chandler’s complex tale of cross and double-cross, while the other two, both of which would make Stuart’s all-time top movies list (irrespective of genre), had borrowed their plots from the novels of Dashiell Hammett and James Mallahan Cain. Two writers who, in his judgement, were the kingpins of hardboiled crime fiction.
Not that Joe would agree! While their son was, similarly, a huge film fan, he had always applied a rigid rule of thumb, which he held to religiously, of refusing to ever watch any film that predated ‘Star Wars’. Ruling out anything made before 1977.
“That means you miss out on so much,” Stuart had frequently tried to argue, “some of the best films ever made. No ‘Citizen Kane’, and no ‘Godfather’, either ‘One’ or ‘Two’.”
But Joe remained resolutely immune to persuasion. Beyond the one allowable exception to his rule (Disney animations), he enforced this self-imposed statute of limitations with a Darth Vader like resolve, happy to stand behind one single, simple justification for a policy many would regard a form of cultural euthanasia.
“Any film made before 1977,” Joe unswervingly contended, “just looks crap!”
The huge technological advances open to today’s filmmakers would likely have wowed innovators like Welles and Wilder, while horrifying traditionalists like Huston or Hawks, but, either way, Joe’s comparison between cinematic eras, based on looks alone, was surely unfair. To Stuart this was like contrasting the relative speed of accessing information between Dewey Decimal and the World Wide Web, when all any researcher could reasonably do was best use the tools available at the time.
However understandable (and explainable) such historical differences were though, there was a base level at which it was hard to dispute Joe’s core contention. If you compared the famous dream sequences from Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’ with those in Nolan’s ‘Inception’ then any argument you were, “comparing apples with pears,” soon fell apart. The clear visual gulf went way beyond any simple fruit disparity, reaching an order of difference more akin to rating a Penny Farthing next to a Lamborghini.
Sacrilegiously, Stuart found himself having to concede there were indeed a lot of things about old films, however classic, that were inescapably (to use Joe’s term) a bit, “crap.” Their scenery was often more MFI than CGI, their sound more dodgy than Dolby, and the acting frequently (even if this was anathemic to movie buffs of a certain age) so over-stylised and wooden it was more chipboard than mahogany!
In the face of this self-wielded hatchet job, let alone Joe’s more vengeful axe, it might seem strange Stuart still rated ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941) and ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944) as highly as he did, but there were two simple explanations for this conundrum, both of which flowed from Hammett and Cain’s pens. Characterisation and plot.
Stuart could forgive a degree of woodenness in his protagonists if they were multi-faceted and engaging, and who needed special effects for stories as convoluted and intriguing as these. Two plots so well plotted their cinematic incarnations, however old, did them justice. It was surely no coincidence neither of these films had suffered a modern-day remake. While you can polish a diamond as hard, and as frequently, as you like, its true value will always be determined more by its original weight.
‘The Maltese Falcon’ remains one of the cleverest mystery stories ever written. As Raymond Chandler (who knew a thing or two) put it, “Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and put it back in the alley, where it belongs,” and the movie adaptation explores a series of blind alleys, with its narrative’s central riddle, enticingly, never fully solved. It is a film that makes your head spin while your heart rejoices.
Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’, by comparison, has a more straightforward, familiar plot, with Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale tempting a previously moral man to act immorally. In this instance to murder her husband for her. It is a classic example of how a simple plot device, if innovative enough, can turn an oyster into a pearl. The scheming couple’s greed, in adding a double indemnity clause to the husband’s life policy (increasing its accidental death pay-out) maximises their murderous motive, yet ultimately helps Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator to trip them up.
Which became the precise point, both implausibly and mistakenly, where Theresa May had ended up worming her way into Stuart’s scattergun, cogitative equation.
Our ‘not so beloved’ leader being, as Joe had once inferred, the living antithesis of a femme fatale, so straight-laced she would never dream of acting fraudulently (which, you had to concede, was an admirable trait in a Prime Minister!), meant there really should have been no possibility of Stanwyck’s duplicitous character bringing her to mind. Yet, crucially, Stuart had always confused the film’s ‘double indemnity’ set-up with the entirely separate legal construct (with equal dramatic potential) of ‘double jeopardy’. The inability to be tried for the same crime twice.
And according to today’s news reports, Theresa May was planning to bring her Brexit Bill back for a second vote, so little changed from its first catastrophic result there seemed little likelihood of achieving a different outcome. As many commentators had pointed out, the PM’s plan reeked of the Einsteinian argument that, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."
The oft-crossed wiring of Stuart’s mind had thus allowed Barbara’s ‘double indemnity’ error to seamlessly segue into Theresa’s predicted contravention of the supposed rules of ‘double jeopardy’. She really was, it appeared, about to be convicted of the same crime twice. And there would be no need for a claims adjuster to establish her guilt!
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Feeling a sudden need for some musical therapy, to free his mind of all this worrying duplicity, Stuart decided there could only, in the circumstances, be one appropriate maverick to call upon. The modern-day doyen of the ‘double entendre’, Jarvis Cocker.
That initial decision made, a second choice inevitably followed, like night after day. To experience Jarvis at his lyrical prime needed the different class of ‘Different Class’. While an argument could perhaps be made for Pulp’s first hit album ‘His ’N’ Hers’ (an overnight success sixteen years in the making), and there was definitely no more Pulp-like song than ‘Babies’, for Stuart it would always be the band’s follow-up that had consolidated Jarvis’s position as the incontestable king of the castle (keeping the dirty rascals at bay) when it came to crowning pop’s best ‘all-round entertainer’.
He had always found it odd, for a branch of the arts that ought to thrive on audience engagement, how the standard of artist’s inter-song rapport was so unremarkable. Most performers, even those loquacious in their lyricism, seemed satisfied with a simple, “thank you,” to acknowledge applause for their previous song, followed by a formulaic, “this one’s called ..,” before beginning the next. Even the most extroverted of singers, with the in-song stage presences of lions, somehow transformed into mice when called upon to address their audience unadorned, presumably the paradoxical consequence of being veiled introverts at heart.
There were a handful of honourable exceptions who highlighted (rather than proved) this rule. Billy Bragg, for example, spends as much stage time regaling his audience, with tall-tales and political polemic, as singing his songs, but this simply makes him part of a small, exclusive club. An online trawl for fellow ‘members’ only netted one further example of this elusive art, with several articles hailing Tom Waits as the head honcho of gig raconteurs. Never having seen Waits live though, Stuart had to settle for awarding his own ‘champion of chat’ title, even if by default, to Jarvis.
There is, patently, little as excruciating as scripted banter, which probably helps explain why silence usually wins the day, but with Cocker this was never a problem you needed to worry about. He had the knack of filling between-song gaps entirely naturally, with random ramblings and surreal monologues, as if putting the world to rights (over a couple of pints) with several thousand friends. You were as likely to come away afterwards talking about what Jarvis had said as what he had sung.
Such a clear dearth of serious contenders made it a fruitless task to attempt any top five list of ‘between-song entertainers’, with just Cocker, Bragg and, by reputation, Waits available for selection the remaining two positions would need to go begging. So instead, Stuart settled for compiling an alternative, Jarvis inspired, rundown of some of his favourite lyrical moments:
5) ‘Something Changed’ by Pulp – A tale of fate Stuart always viewed through the lens of Anne’s late decision to go out the night they met; she could genuinely have stayed at home, gone to bed, or seen a film instead. But she didn’t, and something did change!
4) ‘When You’re Young’ by The Jam – Proof that angry-young Weller always trumps the older-mellower version (however highly that version gets lauded). It is of no use the world being your oyster, Paul bemoans, if your future is set to be a clam.
3) ‘Far from Me’ by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The ultimate example of a bitter break-up comeback line; with the narrator’s sardonic dismissal of his brave-hearted lover who, at the first sign of trouble, went running back to mother.
2) ‘Your Sister’ by Findlay – Seventy years after rock’n’roll first placed betrayal and jealousy at its heart, the subtlest articulation of such emotions finally arrived. The girl he tried passing off as his sister couldn’t be, not given the way she saw him kiss her!
1) ‘Babies’ by Pulp – In Stuart’s view, quite simply the cleverest, most ironic, iconic rhyme ever committed to song, “I know you won’t believe it’s true, I only went with her cos she looks like you.”
(Footnote: Stuart took this as proof not all of his lists were stuck in time, a five month gap since his alfresco ‘Waikiki couplets’ had brought a clean sweep of new entries.)
Two Pulp fictions had made his top five, and there could easily have been more. Stringing words together in ways that both entertained and challenged had always seemed as important to Jarvis Cocker as it did to Stuart. For this reason, more than any other, ‘Different Class’ would always be his go-to Pulp record. A pinnacle of pop perspicacity. Belying the album’s ‘laddish’ reputation (for being brimful of whimsical Britpop standards) its songs held an undercurrent of anger over society’s treatment of outsiders. Even the record’s singalong hits contain barely disguised barbs.
Napoleon may well have been the first to expound the power of delivering, “an iron hand in a velvet glove,” but it had taken Cocker to perfect the approach. In his own inimitable style however, Jarvis had further refined the method of attack; it was now more like an unexpected knee in the groin from a man wearing lederhosen!
Stuart had always preferred his pop served with a side helping of subversiveness, right back to the Stones (‘Sympathy for the Devil’) or the Kinks (‘Lola’), but the mid-nineties brought a high watermark for the form as Jarvis mastered the art on ‘Different Class’, writing a whole album’s worth of the stuff. Never, before or since, Stuart felt, had a sharper, more cleverly camouflaged, poisoned pen been flourished.
‘Mis-Shapes’ kicks things off, sarcastically targeting the bullying of misfits, followed by ‘Pencil Skirt’s first-person account of a controlling, sexual predator, which (in a classic Jarvis touch of ‘light and shade’) also sneaks in the album’s funniest line, “I've kissed your mother twice, now I'm working on your dad.” Next we get ‘Common People’s scathing put-down of elitist cultural-tourism, before anger ramps up further on ‘I Spy’, which its author once described as, “one of the most savage songs I've ever written, definitely the most vindictive.” Yet that very vindictiveness, channelled through a ‘superior’ narrator looking down on jobless ‘wasters’, becomes autobiographically twisted as Jarvis draws fortitude from such attitudes. A bitter pill of a song, with a pleasant aftertaste, to assure us that (sometimes) victims really can have the last laugh.
There was probably, Stuart thought, a whole psychological thesis subtly hidden within the grooves of ‘Different Class’ (a title with its own Pandora’s box of meaning), but today, with another crucial ‘Challenge’ looming, wasn’t the time to try writing it. He consciously relaxed after ‘I Spy’, suspending any more track-by-track faux-Freud forensics to tread a less demanding, equally rewarding path of just enjoying the music.
Having mastered, over the last few months, a very un-Peel like precision in the scheduling of his pre-‘Challenge’ listening, Stuart appropriately reached ‘Bar Italia’s repeated exhortation to, “come on, it’s time,” just as that was genuinely the case.
It might be approaching 10pm (on a Saturday night) in Honolulu, but Joe was precisely on time as he dialled everybody in to their video call at 8.55am (GMT), a consensus having been reached that last month’s pre-brief had proved counterproductive. As a team they seemed to work at their best by getting straight down to business:
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(To be continued, at 9am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 4 (reprise)’ in the meantime? If you think you have an answer, then please reply direct to this email post to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)