June 2007 Archives

ODD MAN OUT (1946)
Director: Carol Reed
Certificate: PG Running time: 112 minutes

Some of the features in this film: a haunting musical score, a frantic search for a missing man by his friends in a bleak post-war cityscape. – are repeated in Carol Reed’s later masterpiece, The Third Man.
  Set in ‘a city in Northern Ireland’ Odd Man Out opens with an aerial shot. The camera proceeds up the lough and zooms right above the Customs House towards the Albert Clock, so there’s little doubt what city is meant.
  Some of this classic British film was shot on location in 1940s Belfast.  For other scenes parts of Shoreditch and Islington doubled for the city. Clearly identifiable Belfast landmarks I noticed were the Robinson and Cleaver building opposite the City Hall and the famous Crown Bar.  However, the most prominent landmark is the Albert Clock. It appears in the background of many scenes.  Its chimes play a crucial part in indicating how time is running out for Johnny McQueen (James Mason) if he is to evade his pursuers and catch a boat due to depart on the midnight tide.  
  A group of conspirators meet in an upstairs room to plan a raid on a mill payroll.  They are members of ‘The Organisation’, assumed but not stated to be the IRA.  Johnny, the Organisation’s leader in the city has escaped from prison.  He’s a changed man.  He has had time to reflect during his time inside and on the run.  He has begun to doubt whether the ‘armed struggle’ does any good.
  Despite the misgivings of his true love Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan) and a comrade’s offer to lead the raid on the mill, Johnny insists on going ahead as planned.
  The raid turns out to be a disaster.  Johnny, last to leave gets tangled up in a fierce hand-to-hand tussle with an armed employee.  In the struggle both men are shot.  Johnny’s comrades panic.  They are unable to pull him into their speeding getaway car.  Johnny falls in the middle of the road.  After a lot of argument and recrimination they turn back but Johnny can’t be seen.  The bickering volunteers return to base, each blaming one-another for Johnny’s fate.
  Time is running out for Johnny.  He’s mortally wounded.  The weather is foul; rain turning to snow.  A relentless RUC head constable is determined to catch him.  Others are also looking for Johnny.  His Organisation comrade  seeks to help him for the good of the Organisation.    
  Others ‘help’ him in order to claim the £1000 price on his head.  Two ex-ARP nurses offer Johnny assistance only to have the man of the house turn him out into the snow. He doesn’t want to get involved. The mad artist wants to capture his dying spark of life on canvas.   Kathleen has the purest motive.  She wants to help Johnny because she loves him.
  It says a lot for this script that the audience is drawn to such an unattractive moral character as Johnny McQueen.  He’s a gunman. A killer. A terrorist. An armed robber. Yet you want the peelers, the traitors, the false friends and the mad artist to fail. You want Kathleen to succeed. To get her man. To get him on the boat out of the country to safety where they can live ‘happily ever after’.  You want it but you know in your heart that it isn’t going to happen.
 Odd Man Out showed that British filmmakers could match Hollywood for cracking stories and quality scripts in the late Forties. Pity about today!  James Mason was always one of the best British actors ever to go to Hollywood. Despite that, he never played a finer part.  Odd Man Out was Kathleen Ryan’s first film but it doesn’t show.  She was easily the equal of  Barbara Stanwyck or any of the American female stars of her era.
   This film would certainly benefit from a new big-screen outing,  In the meantime, the Granada DVD release has a digitally remastered print of Odd Man Out. Also bundled with the film is a PDF of the script, 1972 interviews with James Mason, a Mason documentary on his hometown, Huddersfield and still images from the film.

Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins Penguin paperback

Richard Dawkins is a passionate and enthusiastic advocate of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection.  He's best known for his recent broadside against organised – and disorganised – religion in his bestseller, The God Delusion. Dawkins, Darwinism's 'St Paul', uses this book to explain the workings of natural selection.
 
Dare I say it? Dawkins' sense of wonder and awe at the natural world is almost religious. It's certainly joyous!  I was fascinated by his elaborately observed description of the common spider's labours to build her web. Magnificent.
 
Dawkins argues persuasively for natural selection using the parable of 'Mount Improbable'.He explodes the common myth that evolutionary development is based on random chance. That's an elementary misunderstanding of the theory. “Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.” This is a simple point not often grasped even by those who really ought to know better. Random chance couldn't work.  IN Dawkins' parable Darwinism solves the problem of the theory of life by breaking the improbability involved into small manageable parts. Rather than looking at the towering cliffs in front of us we go up the back of the mountain by the gentle slopes 'inch by million-year inch'.
 
Mutation is the only random aspect of evolutionary development. Selection is non-random, the accumulation of little bits of luck. 'Animals make a living by eating, avoiding being eaten and reproducing'. The changes that allow more animals to survive and go forward tend to remain in their descendants.
 
Eyes are often cited as a problem for the theory of natural selection. In a wide-ranging chapter, The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment, Dawkins examines the eyes of a wide variety of species – from scallops, spiders, insects and cats to humans.  He explains how small incremental mutations can in computer projection show a good fish eye with a working lens in some 364,000 generations, even assuming that for every 101 animals that survived with each improvement, 100 survived without it. There are some forty different kinds of eyes in the natural world. One species of fish Bathylychnops exilis even has two supplementary eyes for looking downwards. These secondary eyes have a different type of lens than the primary eyes.
 
Darwin is often cited as saying, “to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances , for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” This, however was a rhetorical device He went on to say, “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round,, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever lightly varies, and the variations be inherited, , as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should ever be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, cannot be considered real.”
 
The most amazing story in the book is Dawkins' account of the 'enclosed garden' – the fig. The story of how figs are pollinated by very tiny wasps specific to each species of fig tree was mind-blowing in its complexity. The chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
 
This superb book is a terrific introduction to evolutionary science for anyone to grasp.  That's Dawkins' genius. He has the happy knack of jettisoning impenetrable academic language in favour of proper English.  He has to be one of the finest science writers around today.

LOOK WHO’S TALKING?

An interview with Colin Baker

 

LATE LAST month, the Carrick Biz caught up with the former Doctor Who actor Colin Baker at the Genesis Convention in the Park Avenue Hotel in east Belfast.

  Colin Baker – the Sixth doctor – took time out from his busy schedule of events to talk exclusively to the Carrick Biz.

  I was a little bit wary of attending the Genesis Convention.  Perhaps the media stereotype of Trekkies and Whovians as a bunch of peculiar obsessive might have something to it. Would it be a bunch of weirdoes obsessing about obscure parts of the plots of an episode aired some 30 years ago?

  The evidence suggests that any such fears are overblown. The folk who turned up seem to be from all age groups between nine and fifty. The gender balance was not as extreme as I had anticipated. I’d say that between a quarter and a third were female. In contrast, the audience at the last Les McKeown gig I attended was 98% female.

   I mentioned this to Colin, confessing my slight apprehension. 

 “The media in the main do like to create a stereotype. Very often when they come with cameras they’ll ignore the more than 98% of normal fans who quite like the programme and want to come along and meet some stars and talk about – and aren’t barking mad.  There are always a tiny proportion who carry their obsessions to slight extremes.  Of course, the media do love extremes so quite often the poor fans are characterised as something they’re not.”

  I recently discovered that some of the classic Doctor Who characters live on in another format.  A company called Big Finish has been licensed by the BBC to produce new audio dramas on CD.  I recently listened to one of these stories starring Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri. In this story they were trapped on a tramp steamer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The production values are as high on these CDs as any of the Friday night or Saturday afternoon plays on Radio Four.

  I mentioned this to Colin. ‘They are very good. Audio is the perfect medium for horror because you do all the work. The beautiful girl is the beautiful girl that you would like and the scary monster is the scary monster that would scare you. It’s the perfect medium for it and Big Finish have some excellent writers writing for them. I’ve done some cracking stories: stories with Davros.  I’ve got a new companion, an older lady who is a professor of English who is a foil to the Doctor because she’s his intellectual equal, Dr Evelyn Smythe.  She’s a great companion. That’s the great thing about audio – I can have a new companion and still do runs with Nicola and Bonnie (Langford).”

  Asked if more Dr Who CDs are in the pipeline, Colin told me that there are. “Dr Who is going to be a part of my life for some time to come. It’s not a major part in the terms of time I devote to it. This (Genesis Convention) is a day that fits in between two weeks of work in the theatre.  The joy of the big fisnish audios is that hyou don’t hav to learn any lines. You turn up at the recording studio and doe it in two days. I do about five or six of those a year.  It’s up to number 100. I just recorded the hundredth last week. As there’s only four of us Doctors doing them – Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann and Peter Davidson besides me - that means I’ve done around 25 of them. The last one had the Doctor and Mel landing on a planet where two batty old ladies live in a little house in the woods and do unspeakable things to ghosts.  It’s a ghost story in reverse. We rescue the ghosts. It’s quite a spooky story and it’s coming out quite soon.”

  We at Carrick Biz are looking forward to it.  Check out Big Finish’s own website for more details of their excellent audio productions.