1960s
Adam Sweeting
They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Society is changing and so is crime, with serial killers like Ted Bundy and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz baffling the sleuthing community with their seemingly motiveless killings. Into this strange new world walks Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who, despite his Joe College Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are two elephants in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. One appears literally at the film’s climax, emblazoned with graffiti. More significant, and troubling, is the metaphorical elephant in the room: that we’re invited to laugh at a white comedian in brownface.Namely Peter Sellers, impersonating an Indian actor who unwittingly wrecks an upmarket Hollywood shindig. His Hrundi V Bakshi is almost a retread of the character he played opposite Sophia Loren in 1960’s The Millionairess. Still, according to a talking head interviewed in one of the bonus features, the film “was very popular Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the most famous scene in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve’s resplendently blonde Séverine fantasises being tied to the wooden frame of a crude outdoor eating space. There she is pelted with mud by her surgeon husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) and his friend Husson (Michel Piccoli), an older roué she hates but to whom she is perversely attracted.A herd of cows is nearby and the black mud is likely mixed with their shit. Before throwing the ordure and calling Séverine filthy names, the two men discuss the time of day, which is between 2 and 5 pm. These are the hours the 23-year-old Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Some will rob you with a six-gunAnd some with a fountain pen.…I was around 12 years old when I first heard those lines, from “Pretty Boy Floyd”, written by Woody Guthrie and sung by Joan Baez on a live album recorded on her 1962 tour of America’s black campuses. I couldn’t fathom what they meant – how could you be robbed with a fountain pen?I was in the early stages of my obsession with what I would come to understand as “the New York folk revival”, an obsession that has, in ways large and small, shaped my life though the revival was by then already long over. I’m not sure when I figured out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone who finds Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb stepping up to offer their services as their producer is obviously special. It’s a view reinforced by knowing Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Small Faces were already their champions. Only one person fits this unique bill.PP Arnold has had no lack of starry support yet her passage through the music business has been disjointed. The release of The Turning Tide adds to what was known and also plugs gaps. The 13-cut album collects tracks she made with Clapton, Gibb and Elton John associate Caleb Quaye. All but two are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Peter Moffat, author of Silk and The Village, has turned his sights on the last days of Empire for his latest series. Specifically, Moffat has mined his own memories of growing up in a British Army family in Aden in the 1960s, where his father was in the Military Police.The story begins as Captain Nick Page (Joseph Kennedy) is about to leave Aden (an unprepossessing but strategically significant port in what is now Yemen), to be replaced by the young and untried Captain Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones, pictured below with Jessie Buckley). Behind him, Page leaves a garrison Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road. “If I’d not heard Dylan, it might have been that I’d written stuff and sung it like Dominic Behan, or somebody like that.” Despite the non-committal answer, Dylan’s impact on Lennon was clear – the cap he'd recently been wearing was evidence of that.Out of the public eye, Lennon – after being hipped to the album by George Harrison – Read more ...
David Kettle
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He did it with last year’s season opener, Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, and its parallels with today’s refugee crises. He did it in August with Rhinoceros for the Edinburgh International Festival (a production that returns to the Lyceum in February), Zinnie Harris’s new Ionesco adaptation as a thinly veiled critique of Trump and how easily people Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once heard, 1969’s Spirit of the Golden Juice is not forgotten. F. J. McMahon’s sole album is imbued with the heavy air of desolation. Its nine country tinged songs are also melodic and as good as those by Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, with whom McMahon is most often compared. Unlike them, McMahon had not steered a path through the folk circuit to achieve recognition. Instead, Spirit of the Golden Juice was pressed in the low hundreds by the small California label Accent and had no distribution. McMahon’s label mates were guitar instrumentalist Buddy Merrill, a past his sell-by-date Dick Dale and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a timely rerelease of the 1963 version of the William Golding novel, coinciding as it does with the debate about a planned remake with an all-female cast. Peter Brook’s adaptation sticks closely to the original text: according to a fascinating interview with editor/cameramen Gerard Feil that features as an extra here, there was no script as such. Rather the director would read the book with the cast in the evening, work out the dialogue for the next day, and shoot the resulting scenes with several cameras.It’s a striking technique, not quite cinema verité or improvisational drama Read more ...