Other people may depend upon conversation or formal reviews to decide on books or movies, but I tend to follow little trails in a way now made possible by www.imdb.com, Amazon and/or Google. This is what I mean: I’d been stalling about watching “Foyle’s War” though it’s listed over and over in the catalogues selling videos from the BBC. Finally, thinking of Michael Kitchen, I ordered the series from Netflix. It’s a quiet, understated sort of series, so in spite of having an aunt from my mother’s side and an uncle from my father’s side actually in WWII in England, I was slow getting engaged in it. After all, it’s not “Cracker,” which is where I started with these BBC serieses.
But the stories and Kitchen caught up with me and then gripped me tight. But I’d run out of episodes. Both Netflix and IMDB let a person search by actor, so I did that, besides going back to rewatch my favorite old MK videos: “Out of Africa,” “The Buccaneers,” and “Reckless.” Great fun and quite a different MK in each one! I can’t remember what else, but by now I’m up to “The Hanging Gale.” Commentors on my blog suggested others.
Along the way I came to “Falling,” billed as MK being a bad man. So I watched and was very much struck by the actress who played the protagonist who “fell.” Since this was based on a book, I checked out Amazon (and the UK bookstores -- very good luck there!) and discovered that the “writer” in the story was a real person, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and that she had indeed “fallen,” not as a “fallen woman” but as a woman who was vulnerable because of being hurt in a fall besides repeatedly “falling” for faulty men. Instead of ordering “Falling,” I ordered her memoir, “Slipstream.”
Elizabeth Jane Howard was at first married to Peter Scott, the son of one of my heroes, the man who died in pursuit of the South Pole. The movie about the explorer Scott was repeatedly shown to my brothers’ boy scout groups, which I was obliged to attend. When I taught at Heart Butte, my bitterest enemy was the principal who had been in the navy and had landed at the South Pole where he raided one of Scott’s supply cairns for souvenirs. He offered to give me a little box of matches from that cairn and could NOT understand why it only increased my bitterness and contempt for him.
As it turned out, Peter Scott was also emotionally blunt and the marriage ended. So did a series of other relationships though EJH’s marriage to Kingsley Amis lasted almost two decades, a marriage which he began totally besotted with her and ended curdled by contempt for her. It didn’t have anything to do with her -- it was just his usual pattern. (It’s a familiar pattern of mine, too. Not about lovers but about authority figures. I always begin full of hope and end seeing rotten betrayal.) Martin Amis, stepson, remained her friend, which tells you something about both Martin and EJH.
When I finished with “Slipstream,” I passed it on to Sue when I was in Calgary last week. She was reading another book from that “set” in that “era” and had to put the first one down briefly to keep from confusing the two stories. I went on to the BBC series called “The Cazalets,” based on the fictionalized books of EJH and her family that she called by that name. “Slipstream” gives the source material that EJH reshaped into “The Cazalets,” which makes it quite interesting for a writer.
EJH was a very beautiful woman with what seemed like advantages of birth and education, though they didn’t seem somehow effective. Maybe it was a lack of early nurturing that undermined her confidence. (I’d vote for that answer.) Maybe it was just the bad luck of being born into turbulent times on the brink of war. In “The Cazalets” she is scattered out into a number of characters in several generations. She is the young girl who wishes to act (and did), as well as the young girl who wishes to write (and did), and the beautiful woman who tolerates an unfaithful man while both are married to someone else. Bits of her own history crop up in everyone’s stories.
This is the same time period but not the same social class as “Foyle’s War” and the most obvious difference is double: Foyle is an absolute model of rock-ribbed rectitude and honor. “The Cazalets” appear to be morally hopeless, except for Jacqueline Tong’s character: evidently the parlor maid, Daisy, from “Upstairs/Downstairs” who has now taken on Mrs. Bridges’ role as cook and is the same sort of generous and devoted soul. The Cazalets are full of deceit, seize the moment, and think of no one but themselves -- no rules seem to apply to most of them. (As one reviewer wrote, “Hudson would NOT approve!”) But they are rarely happy.
The other difference is the material culture, since Foyle is living in a small coastal town and the Cazalets live on an ancient estate and in London. Of course, in reality the stories are filmed on a mixture of sets and real houses and they are probably both using the same historic cars and trains. The set dressing is sometimes similar. Somewhere there must be a vast warehouse of ancient chintz “puffs” and coverlets, wonderfully extravagant wallpaper in near-shocking colors, and furniture varying from Chippendale to the kind of solid stuffed monoliths that are “good value.” Since the actors are nearly always doing one of three things -- smoking, drinking alcohol, or taking tea -- there must be shelves and shelves of the proper accoutrements. (Actually, they have a lot of sex, too, but they only need each other for that.) They do keep the tea sets and ashtrays sorted within each film but I can sometimes recognize the bone china cups and wonderful silver from one movie to another. By now I recognize almost ALL the small bronzes used in set dressing. The same Greek youth with the same rearing horse and so on.
Tonight I watched the last episodes of “The Hanging Gale” which is rigorously and politically moral with MK this time caught between two forces, the Irish tenants suffering from the potato famine and the Lord who employs him to enforce his rules. It’s easy to see how this is the root of “Foyle’s War,” both in terms of acting and in the impelling force of the plot, although “The Hanging Gale” is meant to be the story of the four Phelan brothers and their fates. Michael Kitchen simply has an unsurpassed ability to express love, understanding and iron will at the same time. But then he can turn around and be a rotten sociopath as in “Falling.” The Phelan brothers would have made short work of him.
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