MUSIC & LYRICS

Nightflight to Venus and Take the Heat Off Me
by Boney M.

If you belonged to the disco generation of the 1970s and early 1980s, then you are definitely familiar with Boney M. and most of their popular songs, many of which had biblical overtones. And if you listened to Boney M. in your teens, then I am equally sure you must have listened to Abba too. They belonged to the same disco era though their songs were very different. Most kids of my generation were dedicated fans of Boney M. and Abba and many other music groups and singers of the time like Tina Charles, The Carpenters, BeeGees, Lipps Inc., and Donna Summer. 

We used to listen to these songs on a white-coloured cassette player of Polish make which my father had purchased for a princely sum of Rs.600 ($12). Some of my cousins and friends heard the songs on the more popular National Panasonic with its trademark blue key for Record. Others had Murphy tape recorders.

For a long time I thought Boney M. were an American pop band till I found out that the music group was created in 1975 by German record producer Frank Farian (Franz Reuther) and initially comprised Jamaican-born British singers Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, Maizie Williams, and Bobby Farrell, its public face. As far as I can remember Farrell never sang a full song; instead, he lent his deep and infectious voice to many of the songs sung by the three women in the group. The often bare-chested Farrell died in 2010.

Back then, Brown Girl in the Ring was one of Boney M.'s most popular songs heard and sung at parties in India, although Ma Baker and Daddy Cool were some of their cheekiest numbers. Ma Baker threatened you with her catchy lines that went...

Put your hands on your head and give me all your money
She was the meanest cat
In old Chicago town
She was the meanest cat
She really mowed them down
She had no heart at all
No no no heart at all

Many of the European pop groups like Boney M. and the Swedish group Abba were more popular in Asia than in USA. I suspect not many Americans have heard their songs assuming, of course, that they have heard of the music bands.

I will leave you with two of my favourite Boney M. songs, Nightflight to Venus and Take the Heat Off Me, courtesy YouTube.

FILM REVIEW

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

The indefatigable Todd Mason has all the links to yet another edition of Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at his blog Sweet Freedom.

Hogan (Clint Eastwood): “See, I spent two years in a war in the States. Right now, all I'm interested in is money.”

Sara (Shirley MacLaine): “If money is all you care about then why did you fight in that war?”

Hogan: “Everybody's got a right to be a sucker once.”

In Two Mules for Sister Sara, Hogan (Clint Eastwood) becomes a sucker twice when he discovers that the “nun” he rescues from being raped by three Mexican bandits is actually a prostitute.

He suspects the whiskey-drinker, cigar-smoking, badmouthing Sara (Shirley MacLaine) to be more than a devout member of the order of the nuns, but he doesn't find out she is a whore until the end.

Sara flashes her shining cross and invokes the lord’s name so often that it leaves “Mr. Hogan” nonplussed throughout their comic adventure across the border.

Hogan: “I'll say one thing, Sister. I sure woulda liked to have met up with you before you took to them clothes and them vows.”

By then, Hogan and Sara, as unlikely a pair as you’ll see on a horse and a donkey, succeed in their mission of joining hands with Mexican rebels led by Col. Beltrán (Manuel Fábregas) and overrunning a fort occupied by the French, with plenty of gunfire and dynamite.

Hogan, an opportunistic drifter, agrees to help the rebels for half the share of gold hidden in the fort. En route to the rebel camp, he comes across Sara and the bandits. He rescues the nun stripped off her habit and shoots her molesters dead. It doesn’t take long for Hogan and Sara to hit it off: they take an instant liking to each other and become good friends, with Hogan’s suspicions of her true identity lurking not far behind.

I enjoyed Two Mules for Sister Sara for several reasons.

1. It confirmed my belief that Clint Eastwood, the unshaven, rugged and unassuming western hero, looks good as a cowboy on a horse; better than most of his contemporaries did. He was born to play the part with cowboy hat, neck scarf, poncho, six-gun, cigar, drawl, grimace, and all.

2. The film is a light comedy laced with tongue-in-cheek humour throughout its hour-plus length. By the time I was through watching the film, I was wondering if I had seen a western or a romantic comedy. Sample this:

Hogan: “Did I or did I not hear you call me a bastard?”

Sara: “Well! I suppose whiskey can make a man hear anything. Oh, Dear Lord, forgive him for the impurity of his thoughts!”

3. The original score by Italian composer Ennio Morricone who also gave us the memorable music for spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Love the beat.

4. In one scene, Hogan drinks himself to death, nearly, to numb the excruciating pain he is about to feel as Sara pulls out the arrow shot into his left shoulder by the Yaquis, I think the Mexican variant of the Indians. Check out the ingenious way in which Hogan tells Sara to remove the arrow.

I could go on some more but that would spoil the fun. In Two Mules for Sister Sara Eastwood is as Eastwood does in all his westerns, larger than the film and yet inconspicuous in the saddle. MacLaine is not new to a tart’s role: she is as natural as Sara as she is as Irma la Douce. What I liked about this film, in addition to their performances, was the novelty of dialogue between Hogan and Sara.

Don Siegel shot the film entirely in Mexico, most of it on location, capturing the country and the village life in all its naked reality, common to all the spaghetti westerns.

Clint Eastwood owes his success as a western hero in large part to Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. In a fascinating interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, Eastwood recounts how he accepted the challenge of working in the first non-American western A Fistful of Dollars co-produced by the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans that gave the world the unforgettable Man With No Name.

BOOK BUYS

The Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell

Last week, I bought nearly two dozen paperbacks from the secondhand bookstore I frequent. The books cost Rs.10 each, less than 25 cents. They were dominated by westerns but also included such books as Transplant by Frank G. Slaughter and The Hessian by Howard Fast, both old favourite writers of mine. I might review The Hessian, a historical fiction, this Friday. 

I also purchased my second book by Ruth Rendell, the famous English crime writer of psychological thrillers and murder mysteries. I have never read anything by Baroness Rendell yet, not even after the purchase of The Copper Peacock and Other Stories last year (I can't say why I haven't read that book yet) or even after reading some fine reviews of her novels on a number of blogs and websites. 

Every author has his or her day, I guess. Ruth Rendell might have hers soon with The Speaker of Mandarin (1983) which I picked up last week. I intend to reverse the singular disservice I have done to her "cleverly plotted" fiction by reading about a murder mystery that takes Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford all the way to China. The last book based in the East that I read was the political thriller The Chinese Assassin by Anthony Grey, the well-known British journalist and author. I recommend all his books, especially the tome Saigon.

The blurb on the back of The Speaker of Mandarin says: "Chief Inspector Wexford always dreamt of visiting China, and was sure he never would. But for once he was wrong..." I think this is a mystery that moves back and forth between England and China. Only way to find out is to read the book.

Now why can't I find the exact covers of books that I buy? Oh, I did! That's the one up there.

BOOK REVIEW

Buchanan’s Siege by Jonas Ward (1973) and 

Blade: The Navaho Trail by Matt Chisholm (1981)

Todd Mason has all the links to this Friday’s Forgotten Books at his blog Sweet Freedom.

Last month, I read two entertaining westerns that were similar in many ways.

Both Buchanan’s Siege and Blade: The Navaho Trail were written by prolific and pseudonymous authors.

While Jonas Ward was William Ard, who wrote detective and western novels with equal ease, Matt Chisholm was Peter Watts, a master of western fiction who also wrote as Cy James, Luke Jones, Duncan Mackinlock, and Tom Owen. Both writers have passed away.

Buchanan’s Siege and Blade: The Navaho Trail have not dissimilar heroes.

Tom Buchanan is a tough drifter. He is strong and dangerous and friendly depending on the situation. He calls himself a “peaceable man” and doesn’t like guns because he has had his share of firearms. In this novel, at least, he doesn’t wear a holster in the beginning, preferring to parley with friends and enemies. Buchanan fights for the underdog and once he takes up a cause he won’t leave until he is through with it, one way or the other. He is willing to risk his life for those whose battles he is fighting.

Joe Blade is called the hero of the savage west, and not without reason. Like Buchanan, he is a drifter who takes on dangerous assignments for anyone willing to pay, usually the government. Blade is also a considerate man who doesn’t think twice before sticking his neck to rescue someone from danger, even if it means running into an explosives-ridden school, hauling a wounded man on his shoulders, and running out again. And, like Buchanan, he would rather go about his task peacefully than exchange bullets with the enemy.

Buchanan and Blade, nemesis of evil and all that is unjust on the Frontier, are two good men to have on any side.

A ranch in Laramie, Wyoming. © Library of Congress

While the plot in the novels is different, their theme and setting are quite similar.

In Buchanan’s Siege, the six-foot-four Buchanan is on his way to Buffalo, Wyoming, to help Colonel Brad Bradbury, the owner of the biggest ranch in the country, reach a peaceful settlement with the smaller ranchers and farmers, which actually means forcing them to sell out and walk away. But, Bradbury’s “friends” in the powerful Cattleman’s Association have sinister plans. They want to take over the other ranches and grab their land by brute force, starting with the framing and lynching of farmer Adam Day for rustling. Buchanan hates lynchers and double-crossers and ends up defending Adam Day’s estranged wife, Amanda, and the owners of some of the smaller outfits holed up in the more impregnable stone house belonging to the Kovacs and Raven, the half Crow girl they have adopted. This is where Buchanan’s siege plays out, as the big man and the handful of honest and unthreatening people, including mountain man Dan Badger toting his Sharps rifle, defend the fortress against more than a hundred gunmen of all shades. They have no choice.

The military Sharps rifle, also known as the Berdan Sharps rifle (above),
was used during and after the Civil War. © Wikimedia Commons

In Blade: The Navaho Trail, which takes plays shortly after the Civil War, Joe Blade is on a federal mission to bring back Colonel Warren Haffner for crimes against the Navaho tribe. Haffner, who served under Brigadier General Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson, thinks the legendary frontiersman was too soft on the Indians and hatches a plot to create trouble on the reservation where the Navaho people are living peacefully. Haffner, who lords over his three grown-up sons, kills Juanito, chief of the Navaho, in the hope that it will lead to an uprising in the Navaho Nation, the largest reservation. Armed to the teeth, the insane Haffner and his sons take over the Indian Agency located on the reservation and wait for the Navaho to come to them. With a bloodbath imminent, it is left to Joe Blade and his girl, the vivacious Charity Clayton, to put an end to Haffner’s evil plans and make peace with the Indians.

Navajo chief Manuelito
© Wikimedia Commons

Yet another similarity in both the novels is the important role played by the Indians.

 

While Raven brings her Crow people to help Buchanan and the Kovacs against the Cattleman’s Association in Buchanan’s Siege, it is Indian Police Chief Manuelito who casts his lot with Blade and succeeds in pacifying the Navaho clansmen, thus averting a bloody uprising, in The Navaho Trail. In both the stories, the Native Americans are portrayed as more sensible and restrained compared to the war-hungry whitemen and their divisive and destructive activities.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading westerns immensely is the many fascinating elements in the stories, retold in the backdrop of historical events, places, and characters, with the Frontier always the focal point of the narrative. A recurring theme in these stories is the triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong, of virtue and vice, of the brave and the coward, of honest and hardworking men and women versus greedy men and profiteers, and of the human spirit that never dies.

In Buchanan’s Siege, for instance, the good and brave people, the Kovacs and the Whelans, have seen hard times that would break most others. They would rather face the bullet and go down fighting for the piece of land they worked so hard to build. The Frontier belongs to them as much as it belongs to power-hungry ranchers, cattle thieves, and shady gunmen who lynch innocent men and burn their houses.

As the likeable mountain man Dan Badger tells Buchanan, “Me and them afore me, we didn’t open God’s country for men like these to hog it, to kill other folks. Some of us had a vision, we seen it is the promised land. Everything’s here, all good. Better the Injuns kept it for themselves, so sez I.”

This is the message that Buchanan’s Siege and The Navaho Trail convey to the reader.

At this point I ought to say a few words about the narrative styles of William Ard (Jonas Ward) and Peter Watts (Matt Chisholm) but I seriously cannot because I am not an expert on western fiction and the many excellent writers who occupy the genre. As an outsider, all I can say is that I enjoy reading westerns and I like the way every one of them is written, each absorbing and entertaining in its own way. I might add, though, that I become so engrossed in all the action taking place that I often overlook the style altogether. What I don’t fail to see is the profundity of the narrative and there’s a fair share of it in westerns.

I am looking forward to reading more  books in the Tom Buchanan and Joe Blade series.

References

Cullen Gallagher has reviewed The Name's Buchanan by Jonas Ward (William Ard) at his blog Pulp Serenade.

You can read more about William Ard and his hardboiled detective and western heroes at Dennis Miller's website and about Matt Chisholm — The Man behind McAllister! over at David Whitehead’s website.

FILM REVIEW

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and Pearl Harbour (2001)

Over the next three days, I will be covering an international expo and conference on construction equipment and machinery in Mumbai. The mighty machines are good to look at and photograph. Meanwhile, here’s a review of two war films that Zero in on a common theme, for (not exactly) Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his Day of Infamy speech to a joint session of Congress, a day after Japan attacked the Pearl Harbour Naval Base in Hawaii.

Tora means Tiger in Japanese but here
it alludes to a torpedo attack.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a realistic docudrama about the events before, during and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. In contrast, Pearl Harbour is a love story dramatised around the events of that fateful day.

I saw veteran director Richard Fleischer's Tora! Tora! Tora! some 30 years ago, in an old, rundown cinema hall called El Dorado in the tourist haven of Goa, on the west coast of India. Except for one scene, I don’t remember anything about this film. In that scene a Japanese torpedo snakes its way just beneath the earth, past a tall tree, still standing, towards men and women who jump out of its explosive path. This could yet be a sketchy recollection. I need to eat almonds.

I certainly don't remember the roles played by the fine cast of Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, James Whitmore, and Jason Robards. But I do remember enjoying the film a lot.

Then, last evening, I watched the final leg of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour, which I had previously seen in two sessions (way I usually watch movies on television). The love tangle of Rafe (Ben Affleck), Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) and Danny (Josh Hartnett) on one hand and the Rafe-Danny friendship on the other does little to elevate the film even though the two related elements are the pivots around which the Japanese bombing of the Harbour takes place. The historical event, which forced America to enter the war, seems like happenstance.

What lifts Pearl Harbour above plot mediocrity is the special effects that make it a visually stunning film, in particular the destruction of the naval base and the US Pacific Fleet by modified torpedoes dropped from the air. In one memorable scene, a warship is shown tilting on its side before turning turtle and taking much of the crew with it. As we see in Titanic (1997), here too sailors slide down the broad deck of the ship and thrown overboard, into the burning sea.

A film like Pearl Harbour, with its historical import, does not require a review; a few observations will suffice. Here are some of mine…

1. I thought Jon Voight made a very good President Roosevelt in the wheelchair. The resemblance is striking. Voight’s FDR is shown smoking a cigarette though I haven’t seen pictures of the real New Deal president smoking one. I know he smoked.

2. One of the things that I don’t like about Hollywood films is the jingoism built into the plot of a film associated with war or an alien invasion. In this film, for instance, Rafe and Danny’s boss, Lt. Col. James Doolittle (Alec Baldwin), mouths lines to stir patriotic fervour among his motley crew of pilots flying to their death. I thought some of his lines were inane and served little purpose. But then, this is Pearl Harbour and America has a right to be super-patriotic. Towards the end Doolittle, Rafe, Danny and some of the survivors salute smartly in what I felt was an overdose of salutes.

The real General James Doolittle

Incidentally, General James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle was an American aviation pioneer and a lieutenant colonel in the USAF during WWII. He was assigned to Army Air Forces HQ and led 16 B-25 bombers on a secret mission to bomb targets in Japan. Spencer Tracy also played Doolittle in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).

3. Apparently, Baldwin’s portrayal of the distinguished general created a furore among those who knew Doolittle. I can partly see why. He appears out of sorts as the commander of a task force out to avenge the attack. He looks as if he is on a picnic. The depth and intensity of the character, in the backdrop of the horrific invasion, is missing. In fact, he looks little different from his character in It’s Complicated (2009) where he woos ex-wife Meryl Streep.

Alec Baldwin as Lt. Col. James Doolittle

4. Petty Officer Dorie Miller (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has a bit role in the film. In spite of graduating from the academy, he is assigned a cook’s job. When his ship is attacked and his mates fall around him, an enraged Miller grabs hold of an anti-aircraft gun and downs a couple of Zeros — “Yeesss!”

Of the three main actors, only Hartnett shows intensity of character. Affleck and Beckinsale are rather expressionless. Their ordinary love story apart, Pearl Harbour scores high for its historical value and special effects, as does Tora! Tora! Tora!

BOOK REVIEW

British Comics: Commando, Love Stories, 

and All Girls

Evan Lewis has the links to this Friday’s Forgotten Books at his blog Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West where you’ll find many interesting entries. 

A childhood without comics is like a newspaper without the comics page.

Issue No.1, July 1961

Last Friday, I took a trip down memory lane and relived the many hours I spent reading the Hardy Boys with my childhood friends. Not surprisingly, I took a few blog friends with me on this nostalgic whirligig. We shared the joys of reading the adventures of amateur detectives Frank and Joe, and Nancy Drew.

A week later, I am still in memory lane, pottering around in the library of my youth, shaking the dust from some more books, and comics, I read as a kid. Of these I have fond memories of three kinds of comic-books I read back then—war, romance, and young adult.

These comics had four common features: their pocket size, impressive cover art, black-and-white illustrations, and speech bubbles. Otherwise, the themes and stories were as different as Daredevil and Donald Duck.

Commando: For Action and Adventure (originally known as Commando War Stories in Pictures), published by D.C. Thomson and Company of Dundee, Scotland, since 1961, remains my favourite war comic-book, though there have been several offshoots the size of your palm.

The Commando comics, numbering more than 4,000 including reprints in celebration of 50 years in 2011, are usually set during WWII and feature stories of bravery, friendship, patriotism, nobility, defection, and cowardice. Most of the time the enemies are the Nazis and the Japanese, who are depicted as very evil, but it is not uncommon to see an Allied soldier and a German soldier becoming friends and risking their lives to save each other. In a typical scene one enemy soldier will carry the other on his shoulder and run to safety. In one particular comic, two enemy soldiers discover, in the thick of battle, that their fathers knew each other, as friends or foes I don’t recollect.

My favourite Commando comics are the ones where the battle plays out in a different war theatre, such as North Africa, the desert sands of Arabia, or the battlegrounds of Indo-China. Likewise, I have a preference for non-combat troops like the French and Italian partisans who fought alongside the Allies.

There is no dearth of ideas for the storyboard and nearly every one of the 68-page comic-book seems real. The stories are fictional, of course, but they leave you wondering if the events really took place. The comics are known as much for their cover art in colour and black-and-white sketches inside as they are for the stories and their often exaggerated plotlines.

Their popularity is evident in the continuation of the series over more than 50 years, new reprints in a size falling between a pocketbook and a regular comic-book, and omnibus editions. These modern-day Commando comics sell for Rs.60 (a little over $1) in India. However, a few years ago, I was fortunate enough to buy a big lot for as little as Rs.5 (almost free in dollar terms), all original.

Unlike Commando, which I still read, I don’t have much recollection of the pocket-sized romance comics called Star: Love Stories in Pictures published by D.C. Thomson or Love Story Picture Library published by the Amalgamated Press, both British imprints. These romance comics also had covers in colour and illustrations in black and white. The stories and pictures were never erotic or vulgar and kissing was the maximum you could get out of a man and his gal. They were milder versions of M&B except they were in comic-book format.

D.C. Thomson, which used to publish the popular Beano and Dandy comics, also brought out a series of pocket-sized comics for young girls under the age of 16. These were known as Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and Debbie. In later years, some of these comics, Judy in particular, were merged with Emma and Mandy and it’s all very confusing. If I remember correctly, the comics were only titled as Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and Debbie and there were no real characters by those names. 

The comics told stories about the everyday lives of teenage girls, their trials, their triumphs, and their glories, with a moral in the end. The all-girls comics were around until the 1990s and I think they have long ceased publication.

Do you remember reading any of these comics? What are your memories of early comic-books?

VINTAGE PICTURES

The cover art of Frank Schoonover

The proof of the book is not only in the reading. It is also in feasting the eyes on the cover. Particularly, if the art is by an illustrator like Frank Earle Schoonover (1877-1972).

Schoonover, one of the foremost students of renowned illustrator and author Howard Pyle, had more than 2,000 illustrations to his credit and many of these adorned the dust jackets of well-known books and magazines that included stories of Hopalong Cassidy by Clarence E. Mulford, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Blackbeard Buccaneer by Ralph Delahaye Paine. 

Hopalong Takes Command oil on canvas
by Schoonover for The Fight at Buckskin
story (1905).

Schoonover worked in his studio in Wilmington, Delaware, where he earned the title of the Dean of Delaware Artists. His art collection, pertaining mainly to the early 20th century period, is preserved at the Delaware Art Museum. The museum was founded in 1912 as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in honour of Howard Pyle. It celebrated its centennial last year.

According to the Schoonover Studios Ltd, “Schoonover’s subject matter included cowboys, Indians, and Canadian trappers. His forms were simple and well defined and his moods powerful. Later in his career, his style became less rigid and more impressionistic. Schoonover was also an accomplished water colourist and muralist and an avid photographer. He used photographs as references for his illustrations to remind himself of the mood and character of the models.” 

The Golden Age illustrator was born in New Jersey, educated at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and died in Wilmington at the age of 95.

You can learn more about Frank Schoonover at Schoonover Studios Ltd and the Schoonover Fund.

Pictures: © Wikimedia Commons