Stop the Week 2

Our family movie of the week was Elia Kazan’s Boomerang. Dana Andrews played a principled DA who followed a hunch that Arthur Kennedy was not the murderer of a local priest in the face of dubious political machinations. Lee J. Cobb, a perennial favourite of mine ever since his portrayal of Johnny Friendly, the menacing union boss in Kazan’s On the Waterfront, almost stole the show as the solid but unimaginative local chief of police.

Where oh where are such high-minded men or women of principle now? There was a period when I thought JFK was one of them. Andrew Marr’s wonderful documentary about the revered one’s presidential campaign of 1960 was possibly the best thing on telly all week. The programme suggested that the much-vilified Hubert Horatio Humphrey got a very raw deal from the media and confirmed, in my mind at least, that the assassination of Bobby Kennedy represented a greater loss for mankind.

Whatever you think of John Lennon’s principles, he certainly wore them on his sleeve. I watched Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, based on John’s troubled boyhood. It’s one of those quiet, unassuming, but classy films – like the recent An Education – that we seem to do so well in Britain. You can’t imagine one of those awful deep-voiced American trailers pumping up a film like this. ‘He was a lost, angry young man who would one day…’

Lovely performances all round, particularly from the ubiquitous Ann-Marie Duff as Lennon’s mum, Julia, and the ever-polished Kristin Scott-Thomas as Auntie Mimi (why on earth would the witless Hugh Grant character in Four Weddings pursue Andie McDowell with KS-T on offer?).

I once met a forthright Liverpudlian felt-maker. She was lodging with Ingrid, the sculptress who bought our old farmhouse in the Corrèze. She told me that she went to the same youth club as Lennon-McCartney. ‘John was a gett,’ she said with feeling. ‘But Paul was very nice. Always nice and polite.’

The film explained a lot about why John could be such a git. As a kid in Belfast, growing up with the Beatles, I loved John, probably because he was so naughty and cheeky. My sister and I would divide up our dinners among the Fab Four and John would always get the choice cuts from my plate. I teased my sister because her love for Paul, the pretty one, led her to eating with her knife in her left hand. 

Now I’ve come to see that she was right all along. Paul gets a lot of stick because he is ‘nice and polite’. Somehow, people seem to equate it with being lightweight. Well, John wrote some heavyweight masterpieces, but he also wrote some solipsistic dross. Paul, however, has a gift for melody and sheer love for the songwriter’s art that puts him right up there with the likes of Richard Rogers, Cole Porter and Burt Bacharach.

Which leads me to two records of the week. (I still call them records.) The first is Marcos Valle’s sumptuous Estatica on the Far Out label, which specialises in the tastiest morsels from Brazil. Those Brazilians, they sure know how to pen a catchy melody. Marcos Valle is one of their finest. He writes tunes that are so uplifting that you can’t help but sing along with the gay abandon of someone plugged into a Walkman – or should I say MP3 player?

The second is The Tribe’s Rebirth on Discograph. The Tribe are a collective of Detroit musicians who cook up very tasty funky jazz together.  The opening ‘Livin’ In a New Day’, served up on a cushion of ominous, brooding synth-bass, is worth the price of admission alone.

‘Mmm. Nice, Max.’