Music

George Frideric Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (1749)

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The Ger­man-born George Frid­er­ic Han­del moved to Lon­don in 1712 and remained there until his death in 1759. My first mem­o­ry that involves Han­del was a piece of music called Water Music, pos­si­bly from some sheet music my grand­ma had but equal­ly pos­si­bly not (it’s one of those ear­ly “not sure where” mem­o­ries). It was com­posed in 1717 in response to a request from King George I for a con­cert on the Thames. Han­del was obvi­ous­ly well in with the Court; ten years after Water Music he was com­mis­sioned to write four anthems for the Coro­na­tion cer­e­mo­ny of King George II. One of these, the glo­ri­ous Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coro­na­tion cer­e­mo­ny since.

Anoth­er notable com­po­si­tion of Han­del’s was Music for the Roy­al Fire­works in 1749, writ­ten for a “par­ty in the park” to cel­e­brate the end of the War of the Aus­tri­an Suc­ces­sion. Mozart called it a “spec­ta­cle of Eng­lish pride and joy”. A year lat­er, Han­del arranged a per­for­mance of his famous Mes­si­ah to ben­e­fit Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hos­pi­tal in Lon­don. The per­for­mance was con­sid­ered a great suc­cess and was fol­lowed by annu­al con­certs that con­tin­ued through­out his life – an ear­ly fore­run­ner of our “ben­e­fit con­certs” today.

It is, how­ev­er, Handel’s piece from his great opera Solomon, name­ly the open­ing instru­men­tal of Act III, Arrival of the Queen of She­ba, that I’m show­cas­ing today. If you don’t already know it from its name, you will instant­ly recog­nise it when you play it below. It has been used exten­sive­ly for any­thing that could ben­e­fit from some viva­cious “pro­ces­sion­al” music (includ­ing the 2012 Lon­don Olympics open­ing cer­e­mo­ny in which the music accom­pa­nies Daniel Craig’s James Bond as he meets the Queen at Buck­ing­ham Palace) and you can hear why: it’s a joy­ous romp of vio­lins and oboes.

The wider piece, Solomon, was wide­ly recog­nised by com­men­ta­tors of the day as a eulo­gy for Geor­gian Eng­land, with the just and wise King Solomon rep­re­sent­ing King George II, and the mighty, pros­per­ous king­dom of Israel reflect­ing the sim­i­lar­ly hap­py state of Eng­land at the time of the work’s pre­miere. Also, since it was in Eng­lish (Han­del had writ­ten his operas in Ital­ian up until Mes­si­ah in 1742), it became huge­ly pop­u­lar with the pub­lic. So put some san­dals on, grab your palm, and wel­come the Queen of She­ba as she dis­em­barks!

George Frid­er­ic Han­del
Film, TV, and Theatre

Cosgrove Hall’s Pied Piper of Hamelin (1981)

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Along­side Aard­man Ani­ma­tions, those bril­liant stop-motion clay ani­ma­tors of Wal­lace and Gromit fame, anoth­er great favourite of the British pub­lic was Cos­grove Hall Films. Bri­an Cos­grove and Mark Hall first met as stu­dents at Manchester’s Col­lege of Art and Design, and then worked togeth­er in tele­vi­sion graph­ics at Grana­da Tele­vi­sion. They left Grana­da in 1969 to form their first pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, Stop Frame Pro­duc­tions, mak­ing TV com­mer­cials, pub­lic infor­ma­tion films and also the open­ing cred­its and graph­ics for TV clas­sic Rain­bow in 1972.

The Rain­bow work led to Thames Tele­vi­sion cre­at­ing a sub­sidiary ani­ma­tion stu­dio in Chorl­ton-cum-Hardy, in Man­ches­ter, with Cos­grove and Hall as its lead ani­ma­tors. Cos­grove Hall Films was born. Its first series, Chorl­ton and the Wheel­ies, was pop­u­lar and ran from 1976 to 1979, but it was 1981’s Dan­ger Mouse that spawned their great­est suc­cess, run­ning through­out the rest of the eight­ies and being syn­di­cat­ed around the world. With famil­iar voiceovers from David Jason as Dan­ger Mouse and Ter­ry Scott as lov­able side­kick Pen­fold, it remains a firm favourite with every­one who lived through that decade.

How­ev­er, it is Cos­grove Hal­l’s mag­i­cal 1981 TV spe­cial, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, that I’m look­ing at today. I remem­ber stum­bling across it and being mes­merised by its bril­liant ani­ma­tion tech­niques. It takes the sto­ry of the Pied Piper as laid down in the words of the poem by Robert Brown­ing (whose lines are used ver­ba­tim) and bril­liant­ly illus­trates the strange tale of Hamelin’s plague of rats, the enig­mat­ic piper who offers to rid the town of them, and the dire con­se­quences when the town fails to pay him the agreed amount lat­er.

Here is a clip of the Pied Piper work­ing his mag­ic on the rats, with the narrator’s won­der­ful­ly rhyth­mic ren­der­ing of Browning’s poet­ry dri­ving the sto­ry along. Inci­den­tal­ly, whilst you could be for­giv­en for think­ing the Pied Piper sto­ry to have come from the imag­i­na­tion of the Grimm broth­ers (who did indeed tell the tale lat­er), the first ref­er­ence to the sto­ry was in a stained glass win­dow in Hamelin itself, and con­tem­po­rary accounts make ref­er­ence to some actu­al event that led to the town’s chil­dren dis­ap­pear­ing in the late 1200s. The stuff of leg­end!

Pied Piper of Hamelin
Literature

Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

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As a teenag­er I was intrigued by the prodi­gious out­put of sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers that you could find lin­ing the shelves at WH Smiths — Isaac Asi­mov, Michael Moor­cock, Robert A Hein­lein, Frank Her­bert and so on — often with appeal­ing, oth­er-world­ly art­work on their cov­ers. Along­side sci-fi you also had the relat­ed genre of sci­ence-fan­ta­sy, or straight-up “fan­ta­sy”, which dif­fers from sci-fi in the fact that, whilst the lat­ter remains tech­ni­cal­ly in a world of sci­en­tif­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty, sci­ence fan­ta­sy allows for vio­la­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic laws of the real world, thus encom­pass­ing all the “sword and sor­cery” fic­tion from Tolkien to Robert E Howard’s Conan The Bar­bar­ian nov­els.

Thanks to Tolkien (I first read The Lord of the Rings some­where in my mid-teens), it was sci­ence fan­ta­sy to which I leaned, if I had to choose, but even then I wasn’t what you’d call a real fan of the genre. I was too eclec­tic, I sup­pose, busy col­lect­ing thrillers by the likes of Alis­tair Maclean or Jack Hig­gins, or hor­ror fic­tion by James Her­bert, or grit­ty pulp like Richard Stark’s Park­er nov­els or Don Pendleton’s The Exe­cu­tion­er series – more killing bad guys than slay­ing drag­ons, shall we say?

How­ev­er, anoth­er name I recall see­ing on those book shelves (but which nev­er read until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly) was that of Ursu­la K Le Guin (1929–2018), an Amer­i­can author known for both sci­ence fic­tion works set in her “Hain­ish” uni­verse, and sci­ence fan­ta­sy in her extra­or­di­nary Earth­sea series. It was the lat­ter I dis­cov­ered a few years ago when I pur­chased her Earth­sea Quar­tet on a whim and found myself amazed and thrilled by her sto­ry-telling. There is noth­ing throw­away about Le Guin’s nov­els, no pro­duc­tion-line fan­ta­sy, these; they are lit­er­ary works that weave an extra­or­di­nary world which has obvi­ous­ly been tak­en seri­ous­ly and com­pre­hen­sive­ly thought through.

The Earth­sea world is one of sea and islands, a vast arch­i­pel­ago metic­u­lous­ly mapped out at the begin­ning of the book, in which its inhab­i­tants under­stand that mag­ic is a real thing, an in-built tal­ent com­mon to all though high­ly-devel­oped only in some, par­tic­u­lar­ly those trained at the school at Roke (Earthsea’s school of wiz­ardry cre­at­ed long before Hog­warts). There are “weath­er work­ers” and “fix­ers”, and var­i­ous low-lev­el mag­i­cal specialities…and then there are the cream of the crop, the card-car­ry­ing wiz­ards, like the pro­tag­o­nist Ged (also known as Spar­rowhawk), who go by the title of “Mage”.

In the first book, A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea, the young Ged, on the island of Gont, over­hears his mater­nal aunt, the vil­lage witch, using “words of pow­er” to attract goats. He tries it him­self, to sur­pris­ing effect, and his aunt recog­nis­es Ged’s excep­tion­al­ism. By the age of twelve he has learned every­thing his aunt can teach him, and so the jour­ney begins. I love the nuanced mag­ic: instead of those dra­mat­ic elec­tric-bolt bat­tles between Gan­dalf and Saru­man, or Har­ry Pot­ter and Volde­mort, we see Ged using a “mage wind” to pow­er a boat for­ward when the wind fails. It’s alto­geth­er a more sub­tle kind of mag­ic. A more believ­able kind, in fact, even if it is just “fan­ta­sy”.

The Earth­sea Quar­tet book cov­er
Ursu­la K Le Guin
Film, TV, and Theatre

Robert Zemeckis’s Back To The Future (1985)

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Remem­ber the times when a sum­mer block­buster could just be unashamed fun? In 1985 we got just that with the release of Robert Zemickis’s time-trav­el­ling mas­ter­piece, Back To The Future. It’s about fate, des­tiny, love, brav­ery, rock ‘n’ roll, the past, present, and future, and all the philo­soph­i­cal conun­drums the lat­ter entails. Heavy on action, com­e­dy and a myr­i­ad clas­sic mem­o­rable scenes, the film deliv­ers great sci-fi, adven­ture, romance, and sub­lime humour, all rolled into one. You all know it, unless you’re from anoth­er plan­et (and even then, hav­ing lived under a rock): Michael J Fox’s Mar­ty McFly is cat­a­pult­ed thir­ty years back to 1955, thanks to Christo­pher Lloyd’s Emmett “Doc” Brown’s time-trav­el­ling DeLore­an car retro­fit­ted with a flux capac­i­tor, and, well you know the rest…

The nov­el­ist L P Hart­ley (not to be con­fused with J R Hart­ley the ama­teur fly-fish­er­man) once said: “The past is a for­eign coun­try, they do things dif­fer­ent­ly there”. And indeed in Back To The Future, the numer­ous and fun­da­men­tal ways in which the 1950s dif­fered from the 1980s are explored to won­der­ful­ly com­ic and chaot­ic effect when Mar­ty embarks on his great adven­ture.

A big part of the fun of watch­ing Back to the Future is how much the first act of the movie informs the sec­ond. Prac­ti­cal­ly every line of dia­logue and char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion from the 1980s has its 1950s coun­ter­part, and usu­al­ly as the set-up for a smart joke. Zemick­is and his writ­ing part­ner Bob Gale also have fun in sub­vert­ing any rose-tint­ed view of the past we might have had. Their fifties may have looked like Hap­py Days but it’s far from being depict­ed as a gold­en age.

Marty’s moth­er Lor­raine tells her daugh­ter: “I think it’s ter­ri­ble! Girls chas­ing boys. When I was your age I nev­er chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy.” Of course, as the movie pro­gress­es we come to realise that this is all fic­tion and the teenage (and boy-crazy) Lor­raine is clear­ly up for all those things and more: she is nei­ther Doris Day nor Joanie Cun­ning­ham. And as for the boys, well, Biff and his socio­path­ic friends are hard­ly bea­cons of respectabil­i­ty, are they? No won­der Lor­raine falls for Mar­ty and his before-his-time, un-tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty.

Any­way, here’s the trail­er that must have whet­ted many an appetite (despite the naff voiceover) when it came out and makes me want to watch the film again now!

Mar­ty McFly and Emmett “Doc” Brown
Art

Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)

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Grant Wood (1891–1942) was an Amer­i­can painter best known for his paint­ings depict­ing the rur­al Amer­i­can Mid­west, par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­can Goth­ic (1930), which has become an icon­ic exam­ple of 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can art. Wood was born in rur­al Iowa and received his art train­ing at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go before mak­ing sev­er­al trips to Europe to study Impres­sion­ism and post-Impres­sion­ism. He always returned to Iowa, how­ev­er, and had a stu­dio at the house he shared with his moth­er in Cedar Rapids. He was a major pro­po­nent of the art move­ment known as Amer­i­can Region­al­ism which arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depres­sion, and incor­po­rat­ed paint­ings, murals, lith­o­graphs, and illus­tra­tions depict­ing real­is­tic scenes of rur­al and small-town Amer­i­ca.

It was while dri­ving around the town of Eldon, Iowa, look­ing for inspi­ra­tion, that Wood spot­ted the Dib­ble House, a quaint small white frame house and con­sid­ered it just right for his pur­pos­es. So why “Amer­i­can Goth­ic”? Well, the house is built in the so-called Car­pen­ter Goth­ic style, an archi­tec­tur­al style bor­row­ing ideas from Goth­ic archi­tec­ture but ren­der­ing it in wood. Here’s the Dib­ble House below, with its arched Goth­ic style win­dow clear­ly shown.

The Dib­ble House

Wood want­ed to add fig­ures of peo­ple he fan­cied should live in that house: a farmer and his daugh­ter. He chose for his mod­els his sis­ter Nan Wood Gra­ham and their den­tist Dr Byron McK­ee­by. The woman is dressed in a colo­nial print apron while the man is adorned in over­alls cov­ered by a suit jack­et and car­ries a pitch­fork. It’s an odd blend, and some took it ini­tial­ly as a mock­ery of “the kind of peo­ple” who might live in such a house, but this was far from the intent of the artist who wished to sim­ply cre­ate an authen­tic depic­tion of real peo­ple in his home state.

Wood’s mod­els: his sis­ter and den­tist

Amer­i­can Goth­ic became one of the most famil­iar images of Amer­i­can art and has been wide­ly par­o­died in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. Exu­ber­ant it ain’t, but it some­how cap­tures a stead­fast spir­it befit­ting of the con­text in which it was paint­ed.


Grant Wood
Poetry

A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896)

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Alfred Edward Hous­man (A E Hous­man) was a life­long clas­si­cal schol­ar at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don and Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, right up until his death in 1936. He was also a gift­ed poet whose pri­ma­ry work, A Shrop­shire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, was pub­lished in 1896 and became a last­ing suc­cess. The col­lec­tion struck a chord with many Eng­lish com­posers, among them Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaugh­an Williams, and Ivor Gur­ney, all of whom set his poems to music.

The col­lec­tion’s var­i­ous melan­choly themes, includ­ing dying young and being sep­a­rat­ed from an ide­alised pas­toral child­hood, ensured that it accom­pa­nied many a young man to the trench­es in the Great War. Hous­man had always had a young male read­er­ship in mind and as W H Auden said: “no oth­er poet seemed so per­fect­ly to express the sen­si­bil­i­ty of a male ado­les­cent”. Equal­ly, George Orwell remem­bered that, among his gen­er­a­tion at Eton Col­lege in the wake of World War I: “these were the poems which I and my con­tem­po­raries used to recite to our­selves, over and over, in a kind of ecsta­sy”.

There’s a phrase Hous­man used that I have always found strik­ing: “blue remem­bered hills”, three sim­ple words that exem­pli­fy the melan­cholic tone of poem num­ber XL, Into my heart an air that kills. It con­sists of just two qua­trains that reflect on the pas­sage of time and the futil­i­ty of long­ing for a long-gone land and age. The speak­er, in a dis­tant land, recalls the hills and spires of his home­land. He recog­nis­es that, whilst he was hap­py when he lived there, he can­not return there now he is old­er and has left that land behind.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far coun­try blows:
What are those blue remem­bered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost con­tent,
I see it shin­ing plain,
The hap­py high­ways where I went
And can­not come again.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Hous­man was­n’t actu­al­ly from Shrop­shire, he was from Worces­ter­shire, and hadn’t even vis­it­ed Shrop­shire until after he had start­ed writ­ing the poem cycle. It is not Hous­man who is the Shrop­shire lad, but a lit­er­ary con­struct. Be that as it may, here’s anoth­er punchy short poem from the cycle, again ref­er­enc­ing the pas­sage of time but this time evok­ing a carpe diem urgency about the here and now. Fun­ni­ly enough, as I write this in view of my gar­den, my own cher­ry tree is hung with snow, its ‘win­ter blos­som’ as implied by this poem.

Loveli­est of trees, the cher­ry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the wood­land ride
Wear­ing white for East­er­tide

Now, of my three­score years and ten,
Twen­ty will not come again,
And take from sev­en­ty springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are lit­tle room,
About the wood­lands I will go
To see the cher­ry hung with snow

A E Hous­man
Art

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

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The Span­ish Gold­en Age of flour­ish­ing arts and lit­er­a­ture in Spain coin­cid­ed with the Span­ish Empire’s polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary dom­i­nance in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, rough­ly dur­ing the reigns of the Hab­s­burg mon­archs Charles V, and the Philips II, III and IV of Spain. In lit­er­a­ture, Cer­vantes was writ­ing Don Quixote de la Man­cha (1605) and Lope de Vega was knock­ing out about 500 plays and 3000 son­nets between the 1580s and 1630s. In art, El Gre­co, Fran­cis­co de Zur­barán and Bar­tolomé Muril­lo flour­ished, as well as the lead­ing artist of them all, Diego Velázquez, who worked under the patron­age of King Philip IV between the 1620s and 1650s.

Velázquez’s ear­li­est works are bode­gones, kitchen or pantry scenes with promi­nent still-lifes and domes­tic activ­i­ty such as his Woman Fry­ing Eggs (1618) which I remem­ber being tak­en with many years ago dur­ing a vis­it to the Nation­al Gallery of Scot­land in Edin­burgh. How­ev­er, it was when he took to por­trai­ture that he gained the atten­tion of King Philip and was invit­ed to become court painter. Diego was able to thrive under Philip’s wing for the rest of his life. He pro­vid­ed por­traits for the court (he paint­ed Philip him­self over thir­ty times) and for lumi­nar­ies of the time such as Pope Inno­cent X, but was also giv­en the free­dom to paint less promi­nent per­son­al­i­ties such as Juan de Pare­ja, a for­mer slave and fel­low painter in his work­shop.

His mag­num opus, how­ev­er, was Las Meni­nas (The Ladies-in-wait­ing or Maids of Hon­our). Paint­ed in 1656 and now resid­ing in the Museo del Pra­do in Madrid, Las Meni­nas depicts the 5 year old Infan­ta Mar­garet There­sa sur­round­ed by her entourage of maids of hon­our, chap­er­one, body­guard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez por­trays him­self work­ing at a large can­vas and look­ing out­wards towards the view­er. In the back­ground there is a mir­ror that reflects the upper bod­ies of the king and queen them­selves. Giv­en the expec­ta­tion that a court paint­ing would be a for­mal affair, Las Meni­nas’ com­plex and enig­mat­ic com­po­si­tion sur­pris­es us and cre­ates an uncer­tain rela­tion­ship between us and the fig­ures depict­ed. Because of its unusu­al nature, Las Meni­nas has been one of the most wide­ly analysed works in West­ern paint­ing, and it’s one of “the greats” that I hope to vis­it one day.

Diego Velázquez, detail from Las Meni­nas
Literature

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843)

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Charles Dick­ens is wide­ly regard­ed as the great­est writer of the Vic­to­ri­an era, and he cer­tain­ly came up with some endur­ing fic­tion­al char­ac­ters. As an aside, I recall the menu at the Out­side Inn bistro in my home town as being a rich source of these: I used to get the Bill Sykes burg­er (smoth­ered in chilli) but there was also a Mr Micaw­ber, a Tiny Tim (served with sal­ad rather than chips), a Tre­ble Bum­ble and so on. Every­one has seen the 1974 film ver­sion of Oliv­er Twist on numer­ous occa­sions of course, but it’s remark­able just how often Dick­ens’ nov­els have been made into films; David Cop­per­field, for exam­ple, has been filmed eight times (in 1911, 1913, 1922, 1935, 1969, 1993, 1999 and 2000). Sim­i­lar­ly, there are six film ver­sions each of Great Expec­ta­tions, The Old Curios­i­ty Shop and A Tale of Two Cities.

When it comes to A Christ­mas Car­ol, how­ev­er, its endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty hits the stratos­phere: there are no less than thir­teen ‘straight’ film ver­sions (as in, named A Christ­mas Car­ol), as well as six or sev­en more fea­tur­ing the name ‘Scrooge’ in some form or anoth­er, and numer­ous spin-off and par­o­dy ver­sions from the Smurfs to the Mup­pets (the lat­ter is sur­pris­ing­ly excel­lent, inci­den­tal­ly). It is there­fore high­ly unlike­ly that you will need the fol­low­ing syn­op­sis; nonethe­less, for the sake of new­ly-arrived extra-ter­res­tri­al read­ers of this blog:  A Christ­mas Car­ol recounts the sto­ry of Ebenez­er Scrooge, an elder­ly miser who is vis­it­ed by the ghost of his for­mer busi­ness part­ner Jacob Mar­ley and the spir­its of Christ­mas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their vis­its, Scrooge is trans­formed into a kinder, gen­tler man.

Dick­ens wrote A Christ­mas Car­ol dur­ing a peri­od when the coun­try was explor­ing and re-eval­u­at­ing its past Christ­mas tra­di­tions, includ­ing car­ols and new­er cus­toms such as Christ­mas trees. He was influ­enced by the expe­ri­ences of his own youth and by oth­er writ­ers includ­ing Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing and Dou­glas Jer­rold. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly inspired by a vis­it to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of sev­er­al estab­lish­ments for Lon­don’s street chil­dren. The treat­ment of the poor and the abil­i­ty of a self­ish man to redeem him­self by trans­form­ing into a more sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter are of course the key themes of the sto­ry.

Pub­lished on 19 Decem­ber 1843, the first edi­tion sold out by Christ­mas Eve, and it has nev­er been out of print since. Dick­ens even began per­form­ing pub­lic recita­tions of the sto­ry at var­i­ous venues through­out Lon­don, which proved to be a big hit with the pub­lic. The novel­la thus cap­tured the zeit­geist of the mid-Vic­to­ri­an revival of the Christ­mas hol­i­day and helped cre­ate the arche­types that were hand­ed down to lat­er gen­er­a­tions, like fam­i­ly gath­er­ings, sea­son­al food and drink, danc­ing, games and a fes­tive gen­eros­i­ty of spir­it.

Here is a nice mon­tage from the 1951 film, Scrooge, fea­tur­ing Alis­tair Sim (mak­ing a sec­ond appear­ance in this blog; see An Inspec­tor Calls) as Ebenez­er Scrooge. Rather than the cur­mud­geon, let’s see the redeemed Scrooge as the Christ­mas spir­it final­ly takes hold with­in him. Sim cap­tures the pathos mas­ter­ful­ly: pre­pare for a warm feel­ing!

To all my read­ers, Mer­ry Christ­mas!

Charles Dick­ens
 
Film, TV, and Theatre

Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (1967)

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Who is your favourite James Bond? My for­ma­tive years coin­cid­ed with the Roger Moore era so I tend to regard him as my favourite Bond, with Live And Let Die my favourite Bond movie. How­ev­er, the defin­i­tive Bond, the one with the cor­rect mea­sure of rogu­ish charm and cool sophis­ti­ca­tion, rugged mas­culin­i­ty and sex appeal, but also gift­ed by the styl­is­tic ele­ments of the Six­ties (was there a cool­er car than the 1964 Aston Mar­tin DB5 dri­ven by Bond in Goldfin­ger?), has to be the recent­ly-deceased Sean Con­nery.

Con­nery made sev­en Bond movies begin­ning with 1962’s Dr No but today I’m look­ing at the fifth in the series, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, which par­tic­u­lar­ly thrilled me as a kid (despite con­nois­seurs gen­er­al­ly com­par­ing it less favourably to its pre­de­ces­sors). With screen­play by one Roald Dahl, it is the first James Bond film to dis­card most of Ian Flem­ing’s plot, using only a few char­ac­ters and loca­tions from the book as the back­ground for an entire­ly new sto­ry. In the film, Bond is dis­patched to Japan after Amer­i­can and Sovi­et crewed space­craft dis­ap­pear mys­te­ri­ous­ly in orbit, each nation blam­ing the oth­er. The Secret Ser­vice sus­pects a third par­ty, how­ev­er, and Bond trav­els secret­ly to a remote Japan­ese island to find the per­pe­tra­tors. He comes face-to-face with Blofeld (Don­ald Pleasence), the head of SPECTRE, which is work­ing for the gov­ern­ment of an unnamed Asian pow­er to pro­voke war between the super­pow­ers.

Direc­tor Lewis Gilbert, pro­duc­ers Cub­by Broc­coli and Har­ry Saltz­man, pro­duc­tion design­er Ken Adam, and direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Fred­die Young spent three weeks in Japan search­ing for loca­tions, with SPEC­TRE’s extinct vol­cano head­quar­ters being a par­tic­u­lar­ly good find. The group was due to return to the UK on a BOAC Boe­ing 707 flight on 5th March 1966, but can­celled at the last minute after being told they had a chance to watch a nin­ja demon­stra­tion. That flight crashed 25 min­utes after take-off, killing all on board: such a lucky deci­sion for the par­ty and their fam­i­lies, and also for the entire future Bond fran­chise.

John Bar­ry pro­duced the score, and (as is typ­i­cal with John Bar­ry) the result was sen­sa­tion­al: the inci­den­tal theme music, and Nan­cy Sinatra’s stun­ning main theme song, knit the ele­ments togeth­er so well. Those ele­ments include all the usu­al tropes: car chas­es, fights, assas­si­na­tion attempts, love action and glam­orous Bond girls (notably the beau­ti­ful Kissy Suzu­ki, played by Mie Hama), gad­gets and gis­mos (includ­ing bul­let-fir­ing cig­a­rettes and a heav­i­ly-armed gyro­copter), and wit­ty one-lin­ers. How­ev­er, the movie is also hav­ing an obvi­ous love affair with Japan, and so as well as a whole lot of nin­ja action, we get some sump­tu­ous Japan­ese land­scapes and cer­e­monies.

The whole thing is of course majes­ti­cal­ly absurd but stonk­ing­ly good fun. Here is a nice mon­tage of clips from the movie along­side Nan­cy Sinatra’s win­ning theme song.

Bond, Tiger Tana­ka, and Kissy Suzu­ki
Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)

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Although I am a con­firmed land-lub­ber, the sea holds a fas­ci­na­tion for me. There’s some­thing quite hor­ri­fy­ing about being in the mid­dle of the ocean, with no land vis­i­ble in any direc­tion and untold depths below, and being in a ves­sel whose for­tune is dic­tat­ed by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own expe­ri­ences of being in the mid­dle of the sea have been lim­it­ed to very safe, reli­able and gen­er­al­ly nature-defy­ing cruise ships, so I’m not claim­ing any real expe­ri­ence of the above. I’m real­ly think­ing about those incred­i­ble sea adven­tur­ers of yore, like Cook or Mag­el­lan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pur­suit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depict­ed in Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Coleridge’s epic poem was pub­lished in 1798 in Lyri­cal Bal­lads, the poet­ry col­lec­tion in which he col­lab­o­rat­ed with William Wordsworth (and which marked the begin­ning of British Roman­tic lit­er­a­ture). For a vol­ume that rep­re­sent­ed a new mod­ern approach to poet­ry, it is iron­ic that this par­tic­u­lar poem seems pre-mod­ern in its goth­ic set­ting, archa­ic spelling and super­nat­ur­al mood; per­haps he thought it was just too good not to be includ­ed.

The nar­ra­tor is accost­ed at a wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny by a grey-beard­ed old sailor who tells him a sto­ry of a voy­age he took long ago. The wed­ding guest is at first reluc­tant to lis­ten, as the cer­e­mo­ny is about to begin, but the mariner’s glit­ter­ing eye cap­ti­vates him, and he sim­ply has to lis­ten. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship depart­ing on its jour­ney. Despite ini­tial good for­tune, the ship is dri­ven south by a storm and even­tu­al­ly reach­es the icy waters of the Antarc­tic. An alba­tross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was get­ting stuck, but even as the alba­tross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his cross­bow.

Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believ­ing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spir­its, and indeed their ship is even­tu­al­ly blown into unchart­ed waters near the equa­tor, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a paint­ed ship
Upon a paint­ed ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The sailors blame the mariner for the tor­ment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead alba­tross about his neck.

Fron­tispiece by William Strang, 1903

The mariner endures a fate worse than death as pun­ish­ment for his killing of the alba­tross: one by one, all of the crew mem­bers die, but the mariner lives on, see­ing for sev­en days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expres­sions remain upon their faces.

Even­tu­al­ly, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lift­ed and he begins to pray. As he does so, the alba­tross falls from his neck and his guilt is par­tial­ly expi­at­ed. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bod­ies of the crew, now pos­sessed by good spir­its, rise up and help steer the ship home, floun­der­ing just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is res­cued but as penance, and dri­ven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wan­der the earth, telling his sto­ry over and over. His cur­rent rapt lis­ten­er, the wed­ding guest, is just one in a long line…

If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner sto­ry, you could do worse than lis­ten to Ian McK­ellen recite the entire thing here!

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