The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club Returns

 

 

The Last Devil to Die (2023)

By Richard Osman

Viking, 349 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

The Last Devil to Die is the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club series. Author Richard Osman has pulled a page from successful television shows that develop  characters that audiences adopt as surrogate family members. Each novel stands alone, but somehow the crew at the Cooper’s Chase retirement home seem like quirky British relatives. In brief, the geriatric core four–Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim–bond to solve murders that stump the police. Of course, it helps immensely that Elizabeth was once an important agent in MI6, the U.K. equivalent of the CIA, and has contacts in high places that local police friends Chris and Donna do not have.

 

The Last Devil to Die begins with a diary entry from the mousy, but sneakily ironic Joyce in which she records her wish that the TMC group can take a break from investigating current murders. After all, in a rest home death already occurs with distressing frequency. She pines for her deceased husband Gerry, Elizabeth’s husband Stephen is slowly fading from dementia, Ron and his ex-wife Pauline have an on/off relationship, and nobody quite knows why Ibrahim is alone. Loneliness has lured a new resident into a money-bilking scam that he insists involves true love. Will this be the only nut the Club has to crack? Of course not! One of Stephen’s friends, 80-year-old Brighton antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma is the premature corpse. Who would wish to harm a man who is already in the twilight of his life? Who indeed? And why would Jill Regan, a high-up muckety-muck with the National Crime Agency assume command of the investigation and order Chris and Donna off the case?

 

Maybe Connie Johnson, who the TMC helped send to prison can shed light. Ibrahim, a psychologist, has been counseling her, if that is the right word. Connie, like “Ib,” is brilliant and the two like to play cat-and-mouse psych-out games. Plus, Connie still operates the East Sussex cocaine trade from her prison cell. The TMC just wants to solve Kuldesh’s murder and she knows the underworld ropes. The quirks of the seasoned protagonists is a constant source of humor and a nice counterpoint to themes of bloodshed and skullduggery. Plus, not everyone at Cooper’s Chase was entirely on the up and up before they arrived. Ron was a bust-a-few-heads union activist and you certainly don’t want to ask too many questions about the doings of their younger Polish friend Bogan, including Joyce’s nosey queries about his relationship with Donna. 

 

Osman spins a tale that involves a conflict between rival heroin kingpins Mitch Maxwell and Luca Buttaci over a recent shipment that has gone missing. This is baffling as the street value of £100,000 is chump change for guys such as they. There’s no rational reason for them to bother with an octogenarian antiques shopkeeper. As Connie observes, even crooks have a code of honor and they don’t eliminate those who are not in “the trade.” Solving the case hinges on questions involving the location of Kuldesh’s phone, who he might have called and, of course, the location of the smack. It will also involve “Computer Bob” Whittaker from Cooper’s Chase, an art forger, her burly Canadian husband, a grifter, a Canterbury professor, transnational intrigue, an escalating body count, a mysterious woman who happens to be in the area where blood is spilled, lots of misdirection, some which-side-are-you-on thugs, and more. Even the title is wrapped in mystery in that it means what you think and what you don’t!

 

Another twist is that we see Joyce assert herself in ways that go beyond what we’ve come to expect of a woman who’d rather bake than be unpleasant. Her acerbic wit is on display, but also planning skills usually left to Elizabeth, who is preoccupied. There’s also a touching revelation about Ibrahim. What is truly unexpected is the late-in-the-book switch to a touching and bittersweet tone that twangs the old heartstrings and invokes the writings of Fredrik Backman. It, as the expression goes, puts a lot of things in perspective, especially the lust for money at the expense of true accounting. Osman’s mix of humor, tragedy, and introspection is a winning formula. Rest assured, he has plans to take us back to Cooper’s Chase in the near future.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

EO A Deeply Moving Film

 

EO (2022)

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

Skopia Films/Alien Films, 88 minutes, Not-rated.

In Polish, Italian, French, and English with subtitles.

★★★★★

 

 

 

Proverbs 12:10 holds that, “A righteous man cares for the life of his beast, but the compassion of the wicked is cruel.” Based upon the movie EO, there are apparently more wicked people in the world than compassionate ones. EO is, by turns, heartwarming and heartbreaking.

 

EO was the first Polish film nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Director Jerzy Skolimowski  based EO on Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. It's not every day you see a movie from the point of view of a donkey, but you will certainly root for one named EO.

 

We meet EO in a circus in which he is in an act with a woman named Kassandra (Sandra Drzmalska) who loves her donkey. In recent years circuses have come under great pressure to eliminate animal acts, but EO is a warning that one-size-fits-all decision-making is not always the wisest course of action. EO is taken from a tearful Kassandra when the Polish state abruptly outlaws animal acts and seizes all circus livestock. Self-congratulatory officials hold a brief ceremony to read a press release and retire to the beer tent. They are smug in their assurance that they have ended animal exploitation, but they have given little thought to what comes next.

 

EO is loaded into a trailer from which he observes horses running free in a field, but he is destined to become a beast of burden. He toils for a farmer but won't eat because he is depressed. EO hears Kassandra's voice in his head and replays her embrace and kisses on his snout. His only happy moment is when Kassandra pays a visit, carrot muffin in hand and tears in her eyes. No wonder EO escapes from the farm and sets off in hope of finding her.

 

The film follows EO’s trials and travails as he traverses the countryside. At each stage he encounters humanity at its cruelest–a wolf left to by hunters to bleed out in the woods, soccer hooligans, drunken louts, a factory farm where caged foxes are killed for their fur, a greasy headbanger truck driver who snorts drugs and plays loud music, a desperate woman being solicited for sex. EO will even encounter a n’er do well named Mateo (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) who stashes him in the back of his car and takes him to a posh villa somewhere in Italy. EO roams an elaborate formal garden and perhaps overhears as Mateo is berated for his gambling debts by the Countess (Isabel Hubert). She is his mother-in-law and maybe something more. Naturally, EO doesn't wish to stay there either.

 

Forget that Skolimowski is an animal rights activist. Whether or not we agree with his implication that humankind enslaves animals, he's certainly endows EO with more decency than any person in the film other than Kassandra. Putting us inside the mind of a donkey is not an easy task but he and cinematographer Michal Dymek use clever camera angles to make us perceive that their lenses are the gateway into EO’s psyche. Pawel Mykietyn’s score adds immeasurably in suggesting what EO thinks in each situation he encounters. It is to his credit that he makes us feel peril, yearning, sadness, and resignation without resorting to melodramatic or maudlin tones.

 

EO features four different languages, but at times it feels as if the human words are just background noise. This is also to say that although EO isn't a silent film, the dialogue is quite sparse. After all, EO is the film's focus and Skolimowski wants to make a point about the one-sided power dynamic between animals and humans. Given the nominations and awards the film has garnered, one would have to say that he succeeded in his objective. Moreover, you would have to hunt far and wide to find a crank who did not like this film.

 

In an Anthropocene world, the odds are stacked against a lowly donkey. EO is such a deeply moving film that you wish to keep the tissue box by your side. It will certainly make you ponder the hollowness of phrases such as “dumb beast.” On a scale of nobility we can score this movie EO one, humankind zero.

 

Rob Weir

Beyond Seuss at the Springfield Museums

 

As They Saw It: Women Artists Then and Now

            Through January 14, 2024

A Gathering: Works from Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists

            Through March 24, 2014

Ways of My Ancestors: We Are Nipmuc

            Through February 25, 2014

Springfield Museums

 

The five building complex at 21 Edwards Street in Springfield, Massachusetts doesn’t get as much love as it deserves. Other than the Basketball Hall of Fame, the city is best known for its association with Theodore Geisel, aka/ Dr. Seuss. Many visitors never even enter the Seuss museum; they head for the sculpture park to let their kids climb on the oversized statues there (signs forbidding it notwithstanding). Three current exhibits give reason to check out a few non-Seuss treasures.

 

As They Saw It is a 60-piece sampling of women’s art displayed in the D’Amour Museum of Fine Art culled from the museum’s own collection and borrowed from the MFA in Boston and the Fenimore in Cooperstown, New York. It wasn’t that long ago that women’s art wasn’t taken seriously by the art world and the handful of those whose work hung on museum walls were pretty much confined to domestic themes. Mostly the ones seen weren’t artists at all, rather the subject for men with paintbrushes, cameras, and chisels. Is it any wonder that in the 1970s feminists began using the phrase “the male gaze?” 

 

Mary Ann Wilson

 

 

The earliest piece in the exhibit comes from Mary Ann Wilson whose “Maremaid” [sic] was made in 1815. It’s a delightful folk art image from an artist from New York State whose work remained unknown until 1943. I was struck, though, by the number of women who turned to self-portraiture. Call them the original selfie creators, though what they created in far more interesting than today’s cellphone snappers. Ellen Day Hale (1885) created hers in a manner evocative of John Singer Sargent until you take a closer look at her boyish face peering outward with… well, what exactly? Defiance? Insouciance? It mesmerizes me when it hangs in Boston and I appreciated getting closer to it in Springfield. Oriole Farb (1978) used looser lines to capture herself in a visual pun. It’s a painting but she’s looking in a mirror, holding a camera, and is poised to snap a selfie decades before such a word appeared! And then there’s Mary Bero’s modernist and abstracted look at her bare-breasted self (1980s).

 

Ellen Day Hale

 

Oriole Farb

Mary Bero

 

 

As one can easily observe, women often bring a different way of looking at the world. That is certainly true of Dorothea Lange, who would get my vote as the greatest of all American photographers. In the 1930s, there were still folks around who were once enslaved. Lange turned her lens on one such individual in 1937 and gave it a telling title: “Ex-Slave with a Long Memory.” Isabel Bishop evinces Reginald Marsh in her 1942 “Ice Cream Cones.” It’s two young women eating their frozen treats on a street corner without constraint as if they couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. There’s certainly a don’t mess-with-me vibe in Cara Lucia Arla’s 2020 photo “Lucia.” In which we see a Native American woman staring full face forward and dressed as a befeathered Wonder Woman.  And then there’s Faith Ringgold, the preeminent African American fiber artist. Note that her subjects are literally untethered in “Dancing on the George Washington Bridge” (2020). 

 

Dorothea Lange

Isabel Bishop

Cara Lucia Arla

Faith Ringgold

 

**************************

 

Aisha Harrison

 

I’m usually not a big fan of ceramics, but I adored A Gathering, which shows works from the very first traveling show of Black American ceramic artists originally organized by the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis. The moment I saw Aisha Harrison’s “Ancestor 1” I wondered, “What  in the blazes took so long? Ellamaria Foley-Ray’s “Earth Seed Quilt” is as it sounds, ceramics as fabric. For poignancy, there is  Earline Green’s “Henrietta.” It’s amazing in how she gives us the illusion of drapery in stiff form, but note the name in at the bottom left. Green evokes Henrietta Lax, the African American woman who died in 1951 whose cell line has been used in research since her death–without family permission. A more recent unsettling homage is Janthiel Shaw’s “Grief for Philando Castile,” a reference to a young black man’s 2016 death at the hands on Minneapolis police officers. You can be excused if you want to wonder back to Kristina Batiste’s calm “prospect and refuge” to recenter. 

 

Ellamarie Foley-Ray

K

Earline Green

Janthiel Shaw

Kristina Batiste

 

**************************

There’s a small exhibit in the Museum of Science to the Nipmuc, Massachusetts Algonquin peoples. Stories of Native Americans are often those of extermination but the photographs behind a diorama of traditional life tell a different tale. They silently scream, “We’re still here and we’re proud.” They also want you to know they are "freshwater people." Mission accomplished. Take a peek and you’ll need no words from me.

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Raw Deal a Decent B-Movie

 

Raw Deal (1948)

Directed by Anthony Mann

Eagle-Lion Films, 79 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★

 

 

 

 

Film noir is best known for its lighting, not dazzling production values. That is certainly the case of the 1948 film Raw Deal directed by Anthony Mann. The cinematography from John Alton is often stunning, even when externals of the picture appear chintzy. Moreover, it’s a pretty decent story that invites us to overlook cinematic drawbacks.

 

Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) is a minor hooligan working for a major one. As is often the case in such arrangements, when things go wrong it’s the low-level guys like Joe that take the rap. Joe agrees to take the fall and go to prison in exchange for a promise from syndicate head Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr ) of $50,000 when he is released. Joe begins to get stir crazy and conspires with his girlfriend Pat Reagan (Claire Trevor) to go over the wire. Coyle even helps with the planning of the breakout, though his secret motive is the hope that Joe will be killed in the effort and he won’t have to pay out.

 

The jailbreak is semi-successful, only semi because the getaway car is damaged during the escape. This forces Joe to hideout at the home of Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), his legal caseworker. She decides to help Joe because she is attracted to him and as days go by, she finds herself falling in love with him. Meanwhile, Coyle orders a hit on Joe and orders his

goons to do the job. They are searching for Joe as, of course, are the police.

 

When the cops close in, Ann fears for Joe’s safety and pleads with him to surrender. Instead, she finds herself on the lam with Joe and Pat. In such cases–a love triangle, an escaped criminal, pursuing assassins, and a sociopathic mob boss–things have a very high probability of going wrong. In this sense, the script of Raw Deal is cut from the same cloth as other film noir movies. Nevertheless it's an interesting film that features a kidnapping, a double cross when the femme fatale reveals herself, an attempt to flee the country, and the proverbial Big Confrontation finale. As I have reminded readers before, don't root for any of the lawbreakers because under the Hollywood code of the day, you couldn't depict a criminal profiting from his inequity. The delight of all film noirs, including Raw Deal, is watching how things play out.  

 

Raw Deal is not a piece of brilliant filmmaking and is generally considered a B-movie. Anthony Mann is best known for the Westerns that he made in the 1950s, though The Glenn Miller Story (1954) was probably his best directorial effort. He did have the sense to allow John Alton to practice his craft and paint the screen in light and shadows, which he did brilliantly. Raw Deal works because of Alton and the cast, especially O’Keefe, Trevor, Hunt, and Burr. The first three were then riding high on the screen popularity list, and Burr would soon win television fame for his leads in both Perry Mason and Ironside.

 

In its day, the movie got mediocre reviews. Of course, back then film noir pictures were quite common so it faced stiff competition. Today, it holds up well because of the synergy between its principals. B-movies like Raw Deal get that label because you don't see a lot of money on the screen. To reiterate, though, if the lighting is right and the script sufficiently gritty, you don’t need an opulent backdrop.

 

Think of Raw Deal as a cheap deal. In my view, it’s definitely worth the investment of watching. What they heck, it’s only 79 minutes long. If you’re like me, you can certainly waste more time doing something less worthy.

 

Rob Weir  

 

 

The Rules of the Game: Rediscover a Masterpiece

 

 

The Rules of the Game (1939)

Directed by Jean Renoir

Gaumont Film Company, 110 minutes, Not-rated.

In French with subtitles.

★★★★★

 

 

 

Timing is everything. The Rules of the Game is a case in point. French auteur Jean Renoir was fresh off two highly acclaimed films, but The Rules of the Game was filmed as war was on the horizon and released several months after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the official beginning of World War II.

 

When audiences got a look at the film, it was booed and became a box office dud. Renoir’s pacifism and Communist Party sympathy didn't help, nor did the film’s uncertain fit among movie labels. It is a classic mixed genre, a satire wrapped in a drama, and tied together with a comedy of manners bow. This may have confused viewers, or perhaps a simply weren't in the mood for what could be misunderstood as frothy entertainment.

 

How quickly the worm turns. The Rules of the Game is now seen as not just a superb movie, but as one of the 10 greatest films ever made. Such lists are subject to intense debate, but there are many reasons to see it as a major cinematic accomplishment.

 

It is loosely structured as a drawing room comedy dressed in 1930s’ circumstances and post-Jazz Age mores. Call it a who-is-sleeping-with-whom film. Aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) has just landed at a Paris airfield. Remember that in 1939 the line between pilot and daredevil was a thin one. André is thus surprised and depressed to see his friend Octave (Renoir) there, but not his girlfriend Christine (Nora Gregor).

 

You might think that Christine had reasons to be AWOL; after all, she’s married to Robert (Marcel Dalio), a marquis living in a sprawling country house. But that matters less than you would imagine; Robert knows about Christine and André and has a mistress of his own, Geneviève, though that relationship is fraught, as she too has another lover. The maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), is married to the jealous, loutish gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot), but she is also being pursued by Marceau (Julien Carette), a poacher Schumacher catches in the act. Rather than prosecute him, Robert hires him as a servant. Marceau isn't very good at that role, but it makes his pursuit of Lisette easier. For her part, Christine's problem isn't one man too many, it's her vanity and her propensity for using others as her moods dictate.

 

Such social arrangements usually work better in the abstract than in reality. Everything conspires and builds to an unhappy endings, including a fatal case of mistaken identity. That also may have contributed to the film's less than enthusiastic reception. It's not as if French audiences we're pining for more anxiety.

 

By most accounts, the set of Rules of the Game was this chaotic as the lives of its principles. Famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson worked in the production and opined there were no rules in the filming of Rules of the Game. Renoir was said to have adopted a style so laissez-faire that much of the dialogue was improvised on the spot.

 

So why the reassessment? First of all, Renoir and cinematographer Jean Bachelet pioneered in deep-focus camera work. That is, they opened the lens aperture to get the foreground, middle ground, and background in sharp focus throughout. That's standard stuff now, but it wasn't in 1939.

 

More importantly, the messy relationships can be seen as stand-ins for the temper of the times. Gadabouts Lissette and Christine embody leftover recklessness of the Jazz Age, and Christine some of the haughty overconfidence that led to France’s defeat a year later. Schumacher is not only crude, he's Germanically so. André is at turns hysterical and morose, hallmarks of the Depression era and mounting danger. Overall we have a cast and set of circumstances that portend disaster.

 

If you wish, though, you could just see the film as a soap opera involving foolish people headed for a fall. Even when we feel sympathy for a character, but we are seldom tricked into thinking any individual is self-aware enough to tumble towards a blissful fate.

 

Rules of the Game is indeed a masterpiece that should be on the bucket list of any serious cineaste. Put another way, there are reasons why Jean Renoir is considered one of the finest directors in movie history. Be sure to see the rediscovered 110-minute cut of Rules of the Game, not the 85-minute version.

 

Rob Weir

My Black Friday Shopping Wish List

 

 

 

 

Santa has arrived and now that he’s done with the Macy’s Parade he’s making his list for 12/25. If you see the Big Red Dude, please tell him I’d like the following:

 

1. A mysterious targeted electronic pulse that wipes out all Christmas music at retail stores and public venues.

 

2. A ban on clothing made of non-natural materials.

 

3. Laryngitis for anyone who tries to say that Trump cares about average Americans—he’d sell your organs on E-Bay—or those who want to say that Joe Biden is not too old to be POTUS.

 

4. A genius brewer to discover that beer can be made without using 3,000 different types of hops in each 12-ounce glass.

 

5. Collective awareness that an “influencer” isn’t a real thing.

 

6. Airtime for any naturalist who can explain the difference between a reindeer and a plain old deer.

 

7. The discovery of a magic pill that transforms pie into health food.

 

8.  An IQ requirement for voting. Or for running for elected office.

 

9. Unionization of elf labor.

 

10. Don’t we all want this one? A definitive explanation of how a rotund dude can fit down chimneys and how he gets into locked homes that have none.

 

Alice's Restaurant: Thanksgiving 1969 Style?

 

 

Alice’s Restaurant (1969)

Directed by Arthur Penn

United Artists, 111 minutes, R/PG (language, brief nudity, drug use)

★★★

 

 

 

Every Thanksgiving you can find a radio station playing Arlo Guthrie’s famed 18:34 talking blues song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre.” Some people say they are sick of hearing it, but isn’t this the time of the year to be bombarded by music we have heard a billion times (to wit, Christmas carols)? Not everyone knows that Alice's Restaurant was made into a movie. It's not a brilliant one, nor is it 100% accurate, even though Arthur Penn received a Best Director Oscar nomination. It hit theaters at an opportune time–just days after Woodstock. Today, it’s an amusing nostalgia trip. Or is it?

 

Most folks know the basics. Young Arlo Guthrie is an about to drop out of his Montana college. He returns East for Thanksgiving and stays with Ray and Alice Brock in an old church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that’s in a state of renovation and chaos. A whole host of friends–hippies, motorcycle gang members, assorted oddballs–drop by for, as the song puts it, “a Thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat.” When it's over, Arlo and a friend load the garbage into a VW minivan and drive to the dump in Stockbridge. It’s closed for Thanksgiving, but they spot a bank filled with garbage and heave theirs into it. They are soon arrested for littering, which turns out to be a major crime in Stockbridge. They are jailed by “Officer Obie” until they make bail and ordered to appear before a judge. In the category of you-can’t-make-it-up, Obie’s photos of the crime scene go for naught as Judge Hannon is blind. It gets weirder when Arlo is drafted and must report to a New York City induction center. He is rejected from military service because of his “criminal” record.

 

This is true (mostly). The film converts Arlo’s 18 1/2 minute song into an 111 minute movie. To do so, details are scrambled, made-up, or exaggerated for cinematic purposes. Some scenes were added so noteworthy people could appear in cameos. For example, we see Pete Seeger at the deathbed of Woody Guthrie (Joseph Boley). Arlo arrives to play harmonica while Pete sings “Pastures of Plenty.” Oddly, Arlo’s littering companion is inexplicably renamed Roger. Former junkie Shelly (Michael McClanathan), a motorcycle enthusiast, is fictional, an excuse for a cameo in which then 26-year-old Joni Mitchell to appear at a snowy cemetery to sing (gloriously!) “Songs to Aging Children” at Shelly’s graveside. One exaggerated detail that caused bad will was the implication that Arlo had once slept with Alice Brock. (For the record, her Stockbridge eatery was never named Alice's Restaurant.)

 

Of course, Arlo stretched the truth in the original song, so I guess we can cut screenwriters Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn some slack. If you realize that both the song and the film are satirical it hardly matters; both captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s when the Vietnam War raged and the counterculture was at its height. The movie is fun to see, especially if you're tired of the song. See M. Emmett Walsh in his first film appearance as the group W bench Sergeant at the induction center and chuckle at the sight of old lefty Lee Hays as a minister. It's also cool to see several people portray themselves including William Obanhein* (“Obie”) and Judge Hannon, who was indeed blind.  Most of those in other roles were depicted by actors. Alice, for example, was played by actress Pat Quinn, Ray by James Broderick, and Arlo's mother Marjorie by Sylvia Davis. You probably won't recognize people in the minor roles and it hardly matters.

 

Why rehash events from over 50 years ago? Well, if you can get past the hippie garb and the political issues of the late 60s, there's quite a lot in both the song and the movie that remain distressingly relevant. Have politics improved since 1967?** Is your daily newsfeed filled with absurdities? Any new wars that ignited mass protest? Has militarism disappeared? Remember that phrase we see in movies: “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Ah, but are there any innocents? Perhaps a healthy dose of satire would do us more good than a second helping of turkey.

 

Rob Weir

 

*In a nice twist, Arlo and Obie later became friends!

** The movie came two years after the song.