Bond-dessiné

The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch is the first installment of a hip French take on the James Bond archetype, unapologetically commercial and satisfying entertainment that comes by way of comic books from old legends.

Tomer Sisley as Largo Winch.

Largo Winch (Tomer Sisley), a foundling, is a Euro hipster hero raised secretly by devoted lifelong helpers in Croatia with a brother foundling. He must deal with a powerful adoptive father surrounded by corporate schemers, an English dominatrix, beefy bad guys and exotic women. He handles these in various combinations and with scarcely a moment’s rest as he jets to picturesque locations around the world from one jump-cut action scene to the next.

Miki Manojlovic and Tomer Sisley as Nerio and Largo Winch

Largo’s father Nerio Winch (Miki Manojlovic) is a billionaire financier, himself from sketchy beginnings in Croatia, whose global empire is headquartered in a Hong Kong skyscraper and who lives on a yacht. Ann Ferguson (Kristin Scott Thomas) is Nerio’s corporate tiger mom; Freddy (Gilbert Melki), a ringer for a young Christopher Lee, is his faithful Croatian retainer.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Ann Ferguson in The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch

The film is in French, Croatian, Portuguese and, except for Scott Thomas (who also speaks French), everyone speaks (or is dubbed in) English with a spaghetti-western accent. The acting, such as it is, has to do more with looking the right part than speaking lines. Alexandre Desplat’s original score is Bondian, and Nerio’s butler Gauthier (Nicolas Vaude) easily could have been cribbed from Bond’s fussy MI6 quartermaster on order of Bernard Lee or, more recently, Ben Whishaw; Nerio’s Miss Pennywinkle (Elizabeth Bennett) nods to Bond’s Miss Moneypenny. The Winch International board of directors resembles a multinational Spectre roundtable.

Tomer Sisley and Mélanie Thierry survive a plot turn in Largo Winch

Young Largo disdains his father’s wealth and power, wandering the earth seeking adventures like Kane in the television show Kung Fu. The action finds him in a backwater in Brazil’s Mato Grosso State getting an ‘invincibility tattoo’ from an illustrated Asian man. The outside world crashes in on Largo grace à Léa (Mélanie Thierry), a latter day Pussy Galore. Nerio is dead and Largo, groomed to succeed him but hitherto kept secret, is identified as his heir by Scott Thomas’s Ferguson. She takes charge of the Winch board and spearheads the search for the prodigal Largo.

Sean Connery's Bond and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore

Mélanie Thierry and Tomer Sisley in Largo Winch

The stakes are upped when sketchy Georgian oligarch Mikhail Korsky (Karel Roden) appears to be engineering a hostile takeover bid for Winch International. But a larger scheme may be afoot.

We know that Largo’s invincibility tattoo was not completed. However, even a highly trained adept with full invincibility intact would be ecstatic to survive the tests and plot twists that Largo undergoes—and that keep viewers on the edge of their chairs throughout.

The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch 2008 France (108 minutes) Pan-Européene. Directed by Jérôme Salle; screenplay, adaptation and dialogue by Salle and Julien Rappeneau from the graphic novel series ‘Largo Winch’ by Van Hamme and Franq; cinematography by Denis Rouden; editing by Richard Marizy; original music by Alexandre Desplat; production design by Michel Barthélémy.

The Uncompromising Way

John Donne’s poetry and a terminal cancer patient’s musings on mortality may not sell popcorn and jujubes, but Emma Thompson leads an excellent ensemble in this wise and thoughtful drama.

Wit, directed by Mike Nichols for HBO, was adapted by Nichols and Thompson from Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Thompson plays Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th century poetry specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne which, she says, ‘explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language.’ Bearing also is dying of metastatic ovarian cancer. Thompson, with an ensemble that includes Eileen Atkins, Christopher Lloyd and Harold Pinter, does a marvelous job of examining Bearing’s life and circumstances in a voice pitched to Donne’s music.

Thompson’s gift for blank verse brings the lines of a Shakespeare or a Donne naturally to the modern ear. It also ennobles simpler stuff, though Nichols and Thompson retain most of Edson’s beautifully written clarity of thought and feeling (some technical discussion of Donne’s work was cut from the original play). For instance, Edson wrote the words Thompson speaks as Bearing considers the passage of time in a hospital room:  

 

‘You cannot imagine, how time can be

So still. It hangs; it weighs; and yet there is

So little of it. It goes so slowly,

And yet it is so scarce.’

 

In the first scene between Bearing and her tutor, ‘The Great E. M. Ashford’ (Atkins), Bearing reflects that Donne scholar Ashford once chided her as an undergraduate for entirely missing the point of Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6 because she used ‘an edition of the text that is inauthenticly punctuated’. (Most online versions use this version.)

Ashford continued: ‘The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation: “And Death” capital D, “shall be no more,” semicolon; “Death” capital D, comma, ‘thou shalt die!” exclamation mark. If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.’


'Just a comma': Eileen Atkins as  'The Great E.M. Ashford' in Wit. 

‘The proper rendition of the text reads: “And death shall be no more,” comma, “death thou shalt die.” Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really.
With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma, a pause. In this way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death, soul, God, past, present: not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma,’ Ashford said.

Bearing at the time owed her misreading to Donne’s ‘wit’: she had not mastered the material because she had not properly thought it through. Bearing’s conception of ‘the uncompromising way’ is signaled by the semicolon at the center of ‘W;t’ in the play’s original title.

Ashford corrects her: ‘It is not “wit”, Miss Bearing, it is truth.’

‘Wit’ in this context is a term of art that refers to a 17th century English literary conceit of which Donne was a master. W. Fraser Mitchell described wit as involving ‘insights into the nature of things, their relations and consequences; quickness in fancy, farfetched simile, antithesis, puns, conceits, and passion.’ He notes that this was of special importance to writers of this period, an age when theological matters were serious business and learned fathers’ ‘witty preaching’ posed subtle Scriptural interpretations to elite, well-educated audiences such as the royal court.

T.S. Eliot, who a century ago revived interest in the writing of this time, wrote: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Eliot advocated for the unity of thought and feeling expressed in this poetry, which he felt had been lost since that time. It was this ‘experience’ that Ashford tried to convey to the young Bearing—‘Don’t go back to the library. Go spend time with your friends,’ the tutor Ashford told her bright student.  

However, Bearing returned to the library; she established a brilliant career as a scholar. She could accept that there is a connection between simple human truth and uncompromising scholarly standards; but she did not truly grasp this connection until her doctors’ own uncompromising way—cancer researchers Drs. Harvey Kelekian (Lloyd) and Jason Posner’s (Jonathan M. Woodward) single-minded focus on her as a case to advance their knowledge of her disease—showed her where she missed the point.

Teacher becomes subject: Emma Thompson and her doctors in Wit.

The film is filled with wit and humor light and dark, much at the expense of modern healthcare providers; Pinter cameos as Vivian’s father. But two moments left the strongest impression.

Emma Thompson and Eileen Atkins in Wit 

Near the end, the elderly Ashford visits Bearing in hospital, her first and only visitor. Bearing is in great pain and heavily medicated. She agrees when Ashford asks to recite something, though not Donne. Ashford finds a book she bought for her great grandchild, lets down the rail of the hospital bed and climbs in next to Bearing to hold and comfort her like a child as she reads her The Runaway Bunny adding commentary (‘Ah, look at that: a little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian? ... Ah, very clever.’). Ashford’s ‘Time to go’ when she finishes the book is as much for herself as for her dying former student.

Emma Thompson and Audra McDonald in Wit.

The other moment comes when Bearing is asleep and near death. Susie Monahan (Audra MacDonald), Bearing’s primary nurse, puts lotion on Bearing’s hands using her own hands without wearing gloves. The nurse appears to do this simply to acknowledge Bearing as a fellow human as her doctors have not done—contact possible to flesh to allay the fever of the bone.

Wit 2001 U.S. HBO (99 minutes) directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Nichols and Emma Thompson; based Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play W;t; cinematography by Seamus McGarvey; edited by John Bloom.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) is a straightforward crime and detection story which unfolds through subtexts of its characters’ intuitions and conflicting motivations.  
 
In Fritz Lang’s last US film, a crusading newspaper publisher at loggerheads with a law-and-order prosecutor somewhere in Middle America (the city is never identified) contrives an airtight scheme to prove that circumstantial evidence can send an innocent man to his execution.

Longtime death penalty opponent Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer), owner and publisher of The Daily Press Herald, editorially derides the politically ambitious District Attorney Roy Thompson (Philip Bourneuf) for ‘trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men’. Thompson insists that he simply follows the facts and the law in a state that prescribes capital punishment.

Dana Andrews, Sidney Blackmer and Philip Bourneuf in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

But what makes this story compelling is the paradox it poses: under the law, a logical pattern of circumstantial facts can convict an innocent person; but alogical intuition can construe patterns from similar facts that point to the guilty. In other words, where lawyers tend to fence themselves in with formulas like ‘following the facts and the law’ to a verdict of guilt ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, there also is the cosmic justice of the biblical ‘vengeance is mine; I will repay’.

Headline news provides a test case in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

A stripper without ‘much more than a suitcase full of nothing between her and the gutter’, left murdered ‘in a ravine just outside of town’, leaves police ‘no clues, no suspects, nothing to go on’. But it gives Spencer his test case for ‘someone whose innocence I knew and could prove, [to be] arrested, tried and convicted for a murder he didn’t commit.’

Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

In Spencer’s eyes, there is no better man for this role than Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews), his former star reporter and prospective son-in-law. Garrett left the newspaper with Spencer’s blessing to become a career novelist after the success of his first novel. He plans to marry Spencer’s daughter Susan (Joan Fontaine) and needs a solid second book to follow his first. A book about being convicted and sent to death row as an innocent man was sure to be a bestseller. Spencer’s idea is that he and Garrett create a false circumstantial case, keeping a meticulous written and photographic record of each detail and telling no one else, not even Susan.  

Garrett calls this ‘a weird, crazy idea’ but goes along with Spencer’s scheme.

Dana Andrews 'the perfect man for the job' in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

‘Of course you could be acquitted, but if you are lucky, you could get the chair,’ Spencer says with relish, making it clear that this is when he would step in. Once Garrett was ‘convicted and sentenced, [Spencer] would reveal the details of our plan’ to the court and Garrett would be pardoned, Spencer says.

The two set the plan in motion by slumming at the strip club where the murder victim worked. Barbara Nichols, Robin Raymond and Joyce Taylor have fun camping up their burly-que roles as ‘exotic dancers’ Dolly Moore, Terry LaRue and Joan Williams. They are Fritz Lang’s platinum blonde answer to Shakespeare’s clowns, lightening the atmosphere as they roll the plot forward. 

Barbara Nichols camps it up in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

As for the subtext of characters’ intuitions and conflicting motivations noted at outset, there is Spencer’s desire to shake Thompson’s belief that only the guilty are convicted. When Spencer’s future son-in-law becomes the suspect, Thompson knows he has to tread carefully but that he must win the case. Spencer assumes that his scheme has Thompson right where he wants him. But Thompson’s investigator once dated Susan and never got over her. Susan, kept out of the loop, and the strippers, are confused because what they each sense in their own way is different from what they hear or see or think they know. And Garrett acts oddly for a man purportedly fighting for his freedom and his life.

Yet amid this farrago of colliding circumstances, the central unanswered question is: Why did a canny old newspaperman, a widower who lives with his adult daughter, pick this moment and this crime to hang on this man in the first place? 

It bears mentioning that, although this is a movie, standards for the rules of criminal procedure were considerably different at this time from what we have today. A series of decisions issued in the following decade by the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren for the first time enumerated and expanded the constitutional rights of people accused in criminal matters. 

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 1956 U.S. (80 minutes) RKO Radio. Directed by Fritz Lang; story and screenplay by Douglas Morrow; cinematography by William Snyder; music composed and conducted by Herschel Burke Gilbert; edited by Gene Fowler Jr.