The Book Tower

A bleak and wintry landscape, where truck drivers tear along country lanes at breakneck speed. Britain in 1957; roadside cafes and bed-sitting rooms. An impressive cast featuring Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery, Herbert Lom, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, William Hartnell and Sid James. You’ve guessed it: Hell Drivers, one of my all time favourite British movies.

Where to start? One of the best things about this film is the cast, and one can easily forget how essential Sid James and Herbert Lom were as supporting actors in the 1950s. Oddly, the least remembered actor from the roll call above is probably the star of the film: Stanley Baker. It’s a shame he’s been forgotten as he always gave strong performances, here impressive as an ex-con who is recruited into a no-nonsense trucking firm.

Cy Endfield’s film has aged surprisingly well. The casting helps, but the writer-director has made a quality film all round, from the excellent script to the well orchestrated truck races. And races they are; once Baker is taken on by the surly boss (Hartnell, giving one of his excellent pre Doctor Who character roles) he realises that he must risk his life every day by driving like a madman to make the required number of deliveries. This is further complicated by his decision to take on the resident maniac (Patrick McGoohan).

For maniacal film roles McGoohan is very good in Hell Drivers, and if he appears a touch over the top the film needs to be forgiven from lurching into melodram from time to time. What the drivers are actually doing in this film is fairly vague; leaving their depot and driving miles across the country as fast as they can, filling up their trucks with grit and then driving back again. Over and over again. “Red” (McGoohan) has decided to be the best at this particular game, pulling such stunts as overtaking on the left, ramming the other trucks that get in his way and tearing across a dangerous quarry that acts as a short cut. There’s no room for Health and Safety in Hell Drivers. The drivers are expected to maintain their own vehicles and seat belts are unheard of (and life threatening as Baker takes his inaugural journey in a truck minus decent brakes). It’s all rather exciting.

So Baker, the softly spoken and quietly tough Welshman, commences battle with the raving Irishman (McGoohan), and eventually almost everyone as he uncovers that Hartnell is running a corrupt outfit. This is the crux of the film, and it works extremely well. Heroes and villains are clearly defined, and the struggle between the good and the bad could easily be transplanted to a different genre, for example a Western. And somewhere, someone has no doubt compared Hell Drivers to specific Westerns, although I personally find the British setting perfect. This film just predates the change in British cinema that was about to take place, and Baker personifies the type of lead that was about to be usurped by the likes of Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. Less of an antihero, less ambiguous, just your straightforward British lead. But Hell Drivers manages to convey very well what life in Britain was like more than half a century ago and before anyone had coined the term “kitchen sink”.

Cy Endfield’s most successful film was the better known Zulu that came a few years later. Whilst it also starred Stanley Baker, probably best remembered is the young Michael Caine. Alas, Zulu is now considered a Caine film through and through, although at the time he was relatively unknown and Baker was still the draw.
Typical of Endfield’s films is the lack of good female actors. In Hell Drivers Marjorie Rhodes is fun as a landlady, but Peggy Cummins is quite irritating as the love interest who comes between Baker and Herbert Lom (here playing an Italian from his huge repertoire of stock roles). Cummins just grates, and tends to be responsible for introducing the most melodramatic moments.

But who can beat a film starring the future James Bond, Doctor Who and The Prisoner?

Footnotes:

1. This is the earliest film I’ve seen that features the trademark laugh of Sid James.
2. A hospital room door has Number One written on it. Patrick McGoohan drives the Number One truck. He calles himself Number One until Baker steals his truck, becoming The new Number One.
3. Both McGoohan and Baker turned down the role of James Bond, which of course went to Connery. There is no evidence that the part was ever offered to Sid James.

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When I was aged 14 I asked for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album for one of my Christmas presents. It was already quite a few years old at the time, but a friend and I had decided to form a band and were plundering classic records for ideas (I forget what he was getting that Christmas, possibly a Who album). My mother had hidden Ziggy Stardust somewhere in the house and one December lunchtime, the place empty, I decided to try and find it. Although she hid it well it didn’t take me long to find the album, concealed amongst her jazz LPs. This was somewhere I never ventured, hating jazz and the music I was often forced to put up with as a background noise. But there, sandwiched between the Ella Fitzgerald, was Bowie.

Like Simon Armitage, I’ve tried to get a grip on jazz and try to like it over the years but have always failed. Also like him, I’ve always much preferred the music I was told I’d grow out of. But I never did grow out of the likes of The Smiths, and I probably never will. In his musical memoir Gig, Armitage also has an enduring Bowie memory, where his father shows a not untypical reaction to the androgyny of Ziggy:

As I walked through the living room with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars under my arm, he pointed at it with the mouth-end of his pipe. ‘What’s that then?’ And he’d obviously heard of the man and his music, because when I told him, he said, ‘David Bowie? He’s a homosexual.’

My mother probably had a similar attitude, although ten years after Ziggy Stardust was first released she had at least mellowed enough to buy me the album.

Gig documents Armitage’s enduring obsession with a number of bands that include The Smiths, The Fall, The Cocteau Twins, The Blue Nile and The Wedding Present. Most of them are still going strong today, and he writes about seeing many of them perform live in recent years. He also meets a few of his icons, not always with satisfying results. As a responsible adult and parent, Armitage is like me still excited by the music that inspired him as a youth. He writes very amusingly about the cantankerous Mark E. Smith of The Fall, muses on the brilliance of Liz Frazer of The Cocteau Twins and ruminates rather movingly on a Morrissey concert. Again, it is his father who turns enjoying the music of Moz into a guilty pleasure:

‘So who is it you’ve been to see?’
He knows.
‘Morrissey.’
‘Who’s he then?’
He knows.
‘He was in the Smiths.’
‘And what did they ever do?’
He genuinely doesn’t know the answer to this question, though he does know how much I liked them, and therefore that I’ll protest too much and in all probability collapse under cross-examination. I can’t believe I’m debating indie guitar music with my dad, but I’ve swallowed the bait and I am.

Although a successful and acclaimed poet (he’s on the GCSE syllabus) Simon Armitage laments the fact that he never made it as a musician. His dream is to be or be like David Gedge, the kitchen sink songsmith fronting the thrashy guitared Wedding Present, everyone’s second favourite band as he puts it. I can understand why as well; being an ordinary guy in many ways an ordinary band Gedge is oddly appealing. He’s also an artist who’s kept at it now for two decades with an enduring fanbase and a strange kind of enviable respect. I agree with Armitage. I’d sooner be David Gedge than Bono any day.

But like mine the Armitage electric guitar stayed mostly unstrummed, or unthrashed, eventually being packed off to a buyer on eBay. The dream sort of comes true towards the end of Gig, however, when he forms a musical duo called The Scaremongers although, strangely, I would have preferred it is Simon had remained the musical bystander. He’s best as the commentator and the dreamer.

In addition to the musical ones, Gig follows some of the poetic, describing his role as a literary performer. Armitage also writes about the lengths he goes to to find inspiration. A trip on a mail train to help shape his excellent poem The Last Post, a visit to Surtsey and work inside prisons to produce his series of films for Channel 4. He’s a likeable man with a witty and self-deprecating sense of humour. Most of all, even in a mostly prose book such as this, a strikingly imaginative voice.

As well as collections of poems, Simon Armitage has also written two novels Little Green Man and The White Stuff. Whilst I enjoyed the first the second was a little disappointing, and the essay-structured yet informal Gig is the kind of book he writes best. In many ways it is similar to his All Points North, which is reissued as a companion to this and is also worth catching.

As a footnote, my mother decided to get rid of her vinyl collection a few years ago. She’d completed the transition to CD and was about to move house, so the heavy collection of LPs had to go. I was invited to take my pick from them before they were hurded off to a car boot sale. Alas I found no Bowie there, not even my missing Cocteau Twins albums hiding between the Stan Getz. After flicking through I took away a couple of Frank Sinatra records. But the reality still is: I don’t like jazz.

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there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses – a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls’ house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingle beach.

This extract from the opening of Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear sets the mood for the novel perfectly; the imagery of the dolls’ house prepares for the surreal atmosphere of the book, as does the use of mirrors and eerily familiar interiors for the nightmare world of Arthur Rowe. The numbed familiarity of the London Blitz is also brought to the fore; writing in 1943, Greene brilliantly sketches the backdrop of a capital at war – strong enough for a modern reader to taste the sound, smell and fear of the bombings.

The Ministry of Fear is one of Greene’s oddest books, and reads at times like his usual prose has been soaked in Kafka and Conrad. The brilliant opening chapter finds Rowe at a sorry wartime fête, where he correctly guesses the weight of a cake on the advice of a fortune teller. Here’s starts Greene’s own nightmarish take on the wrong man story, with Rowe pursued by dark forces across a London under threat of the air raid. It’s a brilliant tale, illuminated by the panic and uncertainly of 40s London. As usual, Greene can say a lot in few words; whilst the novel is brief it is also dense and layered, proving again that he is not always the easy author we take him to be.

Unfortunately this novel doesn’t live up to its early promise. Perhaps I was more interested in the background of the Blitz rather than the plot, which attempts to unravel the weird set pieces, which include a murder at a séance, an encounter with a seedy bookseller and a spell in a sinister hospital, to explain itself more logically. This somehow takes the fun out of things, but The Ministry of Fear is worth a read for an example of good literature that just doesn’t age.

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