RADIO


Dark days, dark deeds Bandits of the Blitz


BBC RADIO 4 I


t was inevitable that this month’s Blitz commemorations would eventually descend to basement level: Duncan Campbell’s feature (8 September) offered a salutary account of the illegal nest-feathering that went on in mainly metropolitan side- streets against a backdrop of ack-ack guns and screaming sirens. Alongside heroism, solidarity and communal purpose came loot- ing, scams and black-market profiteering. The vicar of Walworth remembered setting a guard on bodies recently exhumed from bomb sites in case they should be robbed before the police arrived, and there was a famous case involving members of the Pioneer Corps, who, summoned to clear up after a bombing raid, were found to have helped a scrap-metal dealer strip lead from the roofs of undamaged properties nearby. Campbell’s focus was the legendary Soho mobster Billy Hill, let out of jail in the general amnesty for petty criminals of autumn 1939, and thereby enabled to fashion an underworld empire whose effects would be felt deep into the 1950s. Not much more than a minor offender at the outbreak of hostilities, Hill’s administrative talents allowed him to exploit the chaos of wartime London with a poise that would have done credit to a company CEO, and the symbolic role in 1940s gang- sterism that Campbell attributes to him seems perfectly justified.


A violent thug, who thought nothing of


carving a “V” (for victory, naturally) sign into a victim’s face, and responsible for a string of West End jewel robberies in the first months of the war, Hill was also able to take advantage of the widespread dislike of emergency regu - lations, and the official high-handedness that went with them. Practically everything was in short supply, and when a need existed Hill set out to meet it, plundering West Country bedding depots for blankets and selling contraband whisky to publicans at £500 a barrel. The “spivs” whom Hill sent out on to street corners and into saloon bars were deeply ambiguous figures: officially deplored, but often assuming quasi-heroic status among their working-class clientele. In the strangle- hold he acquired over the gambling dens and prostitution rackets of wartime Soho lay the seeds of vast acreages of post-war criminality. Quite the most fascinating part of Campbell’s enquiry, together with some echt-cockernee recitations from Hill’s autobiography, was an interview with the latter’s son Justin, who remembered his father as a kindly old gent taking him on trips to Regent’s Park Zoo. And the 180 stitches required by Hill’s West One rival Jack Spot? “I don’t condone it, but it’s past history,” Justin assured us. D.J. Taylor


36 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010


Desperation veined with hope: Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone


CINEMA Hard reckoning Winter’s Bone


DIRECTOR: DEBRA GRANIK C


onversations at film festivals between the mixed tribes of critics, delegates and film-


makers often contain a question – sometimes explicit, sometimes neatly folded. Have you seen anything I should have seen? Earlier in the summer, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, amid disagreements about the relevance of hand-drawn animation or squint- ing for signs of originality in new British films, these conversations often carried a coda: then, there’s Winter’s Bone, of course. Winter’s Bone. The title summoned up


Hardy’s wind-whipped fields where raw-eyed, blue-fingered children fumble to pick up flints. This film, set among isolated rural commu- nities in Missouri’s Ozark Mountains, was bound to be tough and fatalistic. There was talk of abandoned families, of drug use and violence and of an extraordinary performance by a young actress. Winter’s Bone had to be seen, clearly, but it threatened to be a miserable endurance test.


At the centre of Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel, from which the film takes its name, is 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) who is trying to keep the family roof, such as it is, over the heads of her young siblings. Her


(Continued from page 35.)


out of their seats – became reality several times at the performance I saw. Another pleasure of the drama is its play- fulness. The combination of postmodernism and populism has become commonplace in such franchises as The Simpsons and Glee but, in 1978, Levin was being very daring in introducing to mainstream drama such a wel- ter of meta-fictional tricks: there are tantalising parallels between the Deathtrap that Bruhl and Anderson are writing and the one by Levin that we are watching, with the non-fictional dramatist teasingly alerting the audience to how many scenes, characters and even murders are yet to come. Some critics have shown grumpiness that


father, whose business is methamphetamine, or crystal meth, has abandoned them, but it gradually emerges that as a parting gift he put the home- stead up for a bail bond which he has now skipped. Her mother, although physically there, may as well be absent, too, so shot is her mind. The milieu (it was filmed on location using the houses of Ozark families) is ter-


rifying in itself: a brown and grey landscape with barren yards and scrapped vehicles where knots of survivalists keep their own well- armed company.


Ree’s task is to pursue her father through


this network of hostile kin and cronies and seek some resolution. Her quest has mythic resonances which become more pronounced. At first, the ferocious resistance she encounters can seem a little American Gothic; you know if a trailer door swings open that some ema- ciated hardman or hatchet-faced matriarch will narrow their eyes at the young woman. The strength of director/writer Debra Granik’s treatment of this material is that you are soon swept along by a thunderous narrative. This takes Ree eventually to an extraordinary scene – one that seems plucked from Homer or Norse myth – which is at once magical, hor- rific, naturalistic and dramatically satisfying. Paradoxically, this film about desperate people is veined with hope. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival. Lawrence’s per- formance is free of sentimentality (you simply forget her age) but so are those around her, including Dale Dickey as a granite matriarch. It makes you want to read more of Woodrell’s fiction. An earlier novel, his Woe to Live On, was adapted as Ride with the Devil (1999), an underrated American Civil War drama directed by Ang Lee, strong on detail and atmosphere. With Winter’s Bone, Granik has done a fine job of pulling the audience into a community that does not welcome strangers. Francine Stock


our most acclaimed young classical actor, Simon Russell Beale, should have interrupted his much-anticipated progress towards King Lear by appearing in a comic shocker but SRB, choosing to make Sidney an English playwright exiled in America, brings his usual vocal and psychological clarity to the part and he (and Claire Skinner as Myra and Jonathan Groff’s Clifford) is tangibly having such an enjoyable time on stage that audiences surely will as well. Running until January, this Deathtrap looks


set to be the perfect Christmas theatre trip for this year; escapism for most who go but, for anyone who writes fiction for a living, also a masterclass in suspense plotting. Mark Lawson


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48