1: The Long and Widening Road

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Greg: OK. Before we start the podcast proper, have you had a chance to look through the film list?

 

Dante: Some of it. It's interesting. When was this from? Because Barry Norman hasn't been around for a while.

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Greg: This appeared as a supplement in the Radio Times back in 2012, so about five years before he died. I knew I had it somewhere. Izabela found it in with some correspondence. We'll need to mention in the podcast that he was a well-known British film critic and this is a compilation of his choices of a hundred films. Arranged by different genres.

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Dante: I've seen quite a few of them, as a matter of fact. I surprised myself.

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Greg: Good. Shall we get going, then? Ready to record? 

 

Dante: Yeah, fine.

 

Greg: Welcome, friends. We start this series of podcasts by saying that we have no idea how long this idea will continue. It's a bit of an experiment. I had a vague plan of doing these until maybe after the result of the US election is known, so sometime in November. We'll see how it goes. My co-host today is the one and only Dante Czaprański. Hi Danno.

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Dante: 'Danno'? What? Have you been watching 'Hawaii Five-O' then? 

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Greg: Not exactly. Czajka came round last night with stories of Honolulu. I think I may be in Hawaiian mode. Maybe we'll get him to contribute sometime. He tells me paradise has its own problems. He sent me a link to one of the local papers. 

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Dante: I tell you what, Greg. I'm not going to be very good here if we don't stick to the script.

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Greg: Don't worry, Dan. We can edit any guff and bloopers later. So what have you been up to lately?

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Dante: Not much. I've been catching up on some of those - catching up with some films which I didn't see when they first came out.

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Greg: I suppose we'd better get on with some sort of plan. I had a vague agenda - the US election campaign.

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Dante: I remember when you were doing our Radio Free Erconwald broadcasts, you were very keen on staying away from any mention of politics. What's changed?

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Greg: Well, this isn't going to be exclusively about politics, except everything involves politics, if you think about it -

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Dante: I thought we were going to be doing mostly book and film reviews.

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Greg: That was the original plan but I'm not sure about books. Maybe some other time, depending on how the podcast goes. Maybe I can get Czajka to come in with some of his selections. But we're both film and music fans, aren't we? And since you mention films, have you seen there's a new film version - from France - of The Count of Monte Cristo?  Wasn't the book discussed in your Absent Drummer?

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Dante: My Absent Drummer? My diaries, yes, and there were contributions from Czajka, remember, but it was Karski who put the whole thing together. But, yes, I've seen the ads for the film, and one or two commentators are talking about swashbuckling and swordfights, but I've got to say I don't remember any swordfighting in the book and I've read it  twice.

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Greg: Wow. Really? I've only seen the seventies film. The Richard Chamberlain one.

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Dante: That was actually a pretty good effort at compressing the novel. But I'm not sure any film version can take in all the complex strands of the story. 

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Greg: I don't know if this latest one will have subtitles. If it doesn't, I'll be struggling.

 

Dante: I've read it has subtitles.

 

Greg: Listen, you mentioned Absent Drummer. I've been meaning to ask you - and I can edit this bit from the podcast; it's just something that occurred to me a while ago - how could you have thought that Speedy was talking about his father when he meant stepfather?

 

Dante: I think I may have mentioned this before. He threw in the odd Polish word now and again and he spoke about his ojczym. I thought at the time that it meant 'father', but I found out later that it's the word for 'stepfather'. And I also recollect him talking about 'his old man', and naturally I assumed he meant his dad.

 

Greg: OK. You also mentioned Karski. Have you seen him lately? I know you both went to the same school . . .

 

Dante: He was in the year above me. For any listeners out there - it was a US Army school in Germany. I don't see him all that often, but we do exchange emails and ideas. 

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Greg: Because I get the feeling he's some kind of recluse, or like the mysterious Robin Masters in the Magnum series, manipulating things from behind the scenes.

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Dante: Magnum? I used to watch that now and again back in the - what was it? Seventies? 

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Greg: I'm watching some re-runs and they all say 1986. I didn't really watch them the first time around, but I'm quite enjoying these. Guess who got me watching Hawaiian-themed stuff?

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Dante: The globe-trotting Czajka, of course. Who else?

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Greg: I even caught up with the 1973 Elvis concert from Hawaii.

But hey - changing the subject, since the plan was for this podcast to be vaguely topical, have you managed to listen to anything other than your favourite Italian music? Any finds? Have you managed to catch up with anything by Taylor Swift, for example? What do you think about the news of the Oasis reunion? 

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Dante: Too many questions, Mozart. I can't help feeling that Oasis took the idea for re-forming the band from our Kreutz Sungrazer reunion of last year. And I have been listening to Italian music, as a matter of fact. I enjoy listening to new sounds, even if most of the music is aimed at people who are half my age or even younger. I may be an old duffer but in my head I'm still eighteen. OK. Maybe fifty-eight.

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(musical filler - theme from Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita'  by Nino Rota)

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Greg: Right. Got some items jotted down here. Time for a look at developments in the USA and the presidential election campaign. How's it looking, Dante? 

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Dante: I'm kind of following CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc, but there's an old school friend of mine who sends me some info from across the pond now and then - blogs and webpages and commentary - and it's looking interesting. How things have changed from a few months ago.

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Greg: So are you going to stick your neck out and say it's going to be President Harris?

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Dante: Er -

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Greg: Go on, Dan. Nobody's listening. 

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Dante: You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. The podcaster admits he thinks there's no-one out there. And, yes, I'll say it'll be President Kamala. 

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Greg: President Kamala? On first-name terms already, eh? Nobody said President Donald or President George or President Richard. 

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Dante: Richard?

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Greg: The president who went to China and ended up having an opera written about him. Which I must catch sometime. 

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Dante: I watched a broadcast of that on TV a while ago.

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Greg: Oh, yeah? What did you think of it? 

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Dante: I thought it was pretty good. And on the subject of Nixon, yes, no doubt he was controversial, to put it mildly, but I think it was Czajka who suggested somewhere that he could be due for a reappraisal. I'm not sure about that, but there was a time, I remember my dad telling me, when RFE was threatened with closure and Nixon overruled the naysayers and basically saved -

 

Greg: RFE - that's Radio Free Europe - for the benefit of our listeners. All two of them. 

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Dante: Not forgetting their dog, of course. Actually, going back to the subject of first names, remember how many headline writers over here were saying 'Boris'? Rather than 'Prime Minister Johnson' not so long ago?  

 

Greg: I wonder what he's up to nowadays? There was a time when you couldn't avoid seeing him on TV, in the papers -

 

Dante: The political page has turned. 

 

Greg: Spoken like a diplomat, Dante. So, back to the USA, what does your friend think? 

 

Dante: I think we're generally on the same wavelength. I was going to say that I didn't see the Arlington Cemetery incident covered over here in the UK at great length, but I guess popular papers tend to cover domestic news and only splash on big international stories.

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Greg: I did see the Arlington story somewhere. I still don't know exactly what happened. But moving on from the USA, let me ask you - before I forget - because I did make a note here. Actually, maybe I'd better stick our jingle in at this point - between topics. This is still a bit of a learning curve . . .

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(musical filler - theme from Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita'  by Nino Rota)

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Greg: Here's what I was going to say. You lived in Germany for a while, didn't you?​

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Dante: A few years in Munich when I was a kid. Tail-end of the fifties and early sixties.

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Greg: So what do you think of that regional election gain by the AfD which made the news?

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Dante: I had a feeling you were going to mention that. Let me read you what I wrote down . . .

 

Greg: Something you prepared earlier? Like those TV chefs?

 

Dante: Ha! Digest this nugget, then: "A nation which can produce people of the calibre of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Heine, Clara Schumann, Thomas Mann, Franz Beckenbauer, Michael Schumacher, etc. is not about to make another catastrophic historical mistake."

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Greg: Nice sentiments. Hope you're right.

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Dante: That's not to say you can airbrush any evil out of a nation's history or pretend that the Nazis were some kind of aliens who suddenly descended on Germany. But in an ideal world, it would be good if a nation could be judged on its best citizens rather than its worst ones - remember the Munich anti-Nazi White Rose, for instance - but that rarely happens. Maybe the best we can hope for - and particularly from historians - is realism and accuracy.

 

Greg: Yeah. The long view. So maybe this result is a blip and the far-right will be seen off by a united opposition? It happened in France recently.

But how about we leave politics and turn to films?

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Dante: Fine. But don't we need our jingle? Between topics? 

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(musical filler - theme from Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita'  by Nino Rota)

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Greg: What I've got here is film critic Barry Norman's - British film critic, the late Barry Norman's list of a hundred must-see films. This came out in 2012, so quite outdated, but shall we see how many of these we're familiar with?

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Dante: OK. I'm up for that. 

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Greg: He has eleven categories. Nine of them have ten films in each, but the tenth and eleventh have five in each, making up the total hundred. So basically there are ten sections of ten films. 

The first category is 'Thrillers'. Number one is Goodfellas from 1990. Seen it?

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Dante: I didn't see it when it came out, but caught up with it last year. Compelling but pretty brutal. 

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Greg: Is that it?

 

Dante: Scorsese has made some great films. I thought Mean Streets was terrific. But what can I say? Goodfellas was a violent story about violent people.

 

Greg: Now that's what I call a concise review.

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Dante: Brilliant performances from a great cast. Did you see Ray Liotta in Cop Land? Also Sylvester Stallone was exceptional in that. It's not necessarily the violence and the killing in Goodfellas that I object to - I know the actors will pull themselves together to star in other movies - but there was one thing I didn't like at all. There was a scene in which a married couple were shouting at each other and a baby which  one of them was holding ended up crying. Genuine distress - too young to be acting. To me that's a dodgy area. I don't think it could have been CGI back in those days.

As for concise reviews, I was going through my dad's diaries a few years ago, and he tended to write down one or two-word reviews for films he and my mother had seen at the cinema. Maybe I'm taking after him.

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Greg: Right. Film number two is Dirty Harry from 1971. 

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Dante: I've seen that and the sequels, I think. Were there three? Tyne Daly was good in - was it the second one? 

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Greg: There were actually five and Tyne Daly was in the third one. The Enforcer. Moving on from Dirty Harry - number three on Barry Norman's list is The Big Sleep from 1946. 

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Dante: I saw it ages ago but don't remember much about it. Was it with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre? And Humphrey Bogart, of course.

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Greg: You're thinking of The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep had Elisha Cook Jr in it and strangely enough, I just saw him as a guest star in one of the Magnum episodes. Number four on Norman's list is The Godfather from 1972. 

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Dante: So the first one of the trilogy. Have you seen the revised last one?

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Greg: Yeah. And it's no good saying this is a violent story about violent people because these films are classics. 

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Dante: Far be it from me to disagree. There is some superb acting all round. I don't think I can add to what's already been said about any of these films. Although I don't know many women who are huge fans, I've got to say.

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Greg: Number five is The Silence of the Lambs from 1991. 

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Dante: Pass. I've never seen it. Maybe I'll get around to it one day. 

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Greg: Really? I thought - well, if you haven't seen it, then you haven't seen it.

How about number six on the list; LA Confidential from 1997?

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Dante: Nope. Another one that has passed me by.

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Greg: You mean you passed it by. We're not doing too well here.

This next one - number seven - you must have seen. Hitchcock's North by Northwest from 1959. 

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Dante: Definitely. I've seen it a few times. Excellent film. And we could get into a discussion about other Hitchcock films, but I can see you're looking at the clock.

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Greg: No, don't worry. Which other Hitchcock films did you have in mind? 

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Dante: Where do I begin? There are so many: Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder . . .

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Greg: Strangers on a Train, The Birds, Marnie . . .

 

Dante: Apparently - so I've been told - the word 'marnie' in Polish is an adverb and translates as 'badly' or 'poorly'. 

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Greg: Fascinating, Mr Czaprański. OK, shall we go to number eight? It's Chinatown from 1974.

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Dante: I saw it when it first came out. I went to the cinema with - with - I don't remember. I don't remember much about the film either apart from the plaster on the guy's nose. 

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Greg: Number nine is - guess what? - another Hitchcock: Psycho from 1960. 

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Dante: Again, what can I say that hasn't already been said? Any horror seems mild by today's standards.

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Greg: And the last one in this category is . . .The Third Man from 1949.

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Dante: One of my absolute all-time favourites. I read somewhere that Welles ad-libbed the ferris wheel speech. 

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Greg: "Five hundred years of democracy and brotherly love and what did that produce?"

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Dante: Spoiler alert, ladies and gentlemen. Spoiler alert.

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Greg: We could discuss other Orson Welles films, but - spoiler alert - Citizen Kane comes up in one of Barry Norman's other categories.

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Dante: I did jot down some notes when you gave me this list. No Mission Impossible films? Wouldn't they be classed as thrillers? Or any of the Bourne films? Or do they come up in another category? Action movies?

 

Greg: I was thinking there should be at least one Bond film here. But also, what about the seventies disaster movies - The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure. Or the more recent Terminator films? 

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Dante: The Taking of Pelham 123? 

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Greg: Assault on Precinct 13? Or maybe that's classed as horror? 

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Dante: RoboCop? Or is that sci-fi?

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Greg: So many more, but I think we'd better stop somewhere. Are you up for more of Barry Norman's choices?

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Dante: Why not? What's the next category, as if I didn't know?

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Greg: Next time is 'Romances', and before you say 'chick-flicks', that's not necessarily what they are.

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Dante: I wasn't about to say that, Greg. We're not unreconstructed relics of the seventies, are we?

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Greg: Not sure. I do feel a bit of a relic right now after all those film titles. As if I've been clobbered by history. 

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Dante: Forget about films for a bit. Go read a book. Until next time. Arrivederci. 

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(longer section of Nino Rota's 'La Dolce Vita' theme)​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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