What is it about Covid 19 that so many banks act as if it’s the golden excuse to do nothing?

High Street Banks.  I mean, what’s the point? There are none on the High Street? Croydon used to have two branches of HSBC.  Now there are none.  You have to go over to Wallington.  Banks like HSBC may think that they don’t need branches but why else do they think that people put up with their measly interest rates and avaricious lending rates?  It’s because there’s a branch where you can pay in cash and ask questions.

Not that I’m a fan of cash.  I’m all for dumping it but the end of the cash society hasn’t happened yet.  They’re slightly jumping the gun.  Of course there’s the telephone … but Halifax aren’t taking any calls about anything that’s not an emergency.  Why?  None of these workers have been furloughed?  What else are they going to do all day?  I’ve been going into work all day so what’s their problem?  Why do banks need to close for Covid or have reduced hours?  Most of the staff sat behind reinforced Perspex screens even before the pandemic.

Unless you have huge savings and need them underwritten by the UK Treasury guarantee scheme or you want a mortgage and don’t want to end up stiffed over like those who mortgaged with Northern Rock and were punished with punitive rates by the UK government after bailout … why would you bother ever go near the oxymoron that is a UK “High Street” Bank?

Banks may think they’re clever forcing everyone to go digital and closing all branches but if you’re never going to be dealing in folding paper money and everything’s digital …why bother using pounds sterling at all and having your money pinned to the whims and caprices of the UK Treasury?  You may as well change to any other currency or crypto-currency?  And then what’s the point in the High Street Bank?  And without High Street Banks how does the government lever the economy by interest rate changes or collect tax on interest savings…?

Of course Banks will be getting more enquiries due to Covid-19 but isn’t that like more business for them?  They should be making a fortune repackaging debt but instead…

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Nero?

 

In other Covid void filling news I have also recently been watching "Quo Vadis" … after I realised the other day that it was actually directed by Mervyn LeRoy who, of course, also directed Little Caesar … famous (to those of a certain age before black and white films became verboten or designated to Talking Pictures TV) for its memorable last line "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"   As a bit of an in-joke in Quo Vadis Peter Ustinov’s Caesar Nero expires with a very similar line “Is this the end of Nero?”.  Credit where its due I would not have spotted this without the Blu Ray commentary by film historian F. X. Freeney.

Polish Nobel Laureate author Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel about Nero and the great fire of Rome had already been filmed 3 times before this but the sheer scale of this 1951 production is epic.  There really are scenes with 5000 extras and even more fake extras than that created by revolving coloured disk and lights behind a matt painting to give the illusion of vast crowds in the Colosseum. 

The main plot of the film is a largely dreary love story between Christian ex-slave Lygia (Deborah Kerr) and Robert Taylor’s pompous Marcus Vinicius but it seems all an excuse to let Peter Ustinov play Nero as completely bonkers yet deadly dangerous.  The studio may have attempted to film this piece of Catholic propaganda from an agnostic viewpoint but there’s no doubt the novel it comes from is blatant propaganda for the RCC.  I mean, it has got the first Pope in...   

It’s curious to see Finlay Currie playing the gentle “fisher of men” Peter given his previous reputation for gruff roles – the most memorable of which is probably as Magwitch in David Lean’s Great Expectations – but he has the beard for it.   The film also reminded one how forgotten the Acts of the Apostles now are … and suddenly from on high I heard the voice of Uncle Mort remarking how he liked a good image of Paul of Tarsus. 

You have to wonder if anyone would get away with making such a pro-religious film today… Well, Mel Gibson did (adapting the visions of a nun and filming at the same stuidos) but the less said about that ... Interestingly, when Jesus does appear in flashback he’s filmed from behind just as in Ben Hur and the many other Biblical/Roman epic sagas this film revived.   

Mervyn Le Roy was a studio director who’d more or less just been told to go away and make the film so he sought advice from Cecil B. DeMille about how to handle the vast crowd scenes ....  Asking DeMille what had attracted him to Biblical epics he got the reply “2000 years of free publicity.”

The stand out characters in the film are Peter Ustinov’s Nero whose quest to become the greatest artist leads him to start the great fire of Rome and his courtier and nemesis Petronius played superbly by Leo Genn who simultaneously flatters and ridicules his master until it all goes sour and he is instructed to do himself in.  His lines are very acerbic ... as you would expect from the author of Satyricon.   

Satyricon its self was eventually made into a film by Fellini and filmed at the same vast Cinecittà Studios in Italy – a relic of Mussolini’s ventures into the film Industry...   Unfortunately for Mussolini although he built a huge massive studio in the 30s he was even then so unpopular internationally that no one in Hollywood would work with him except Hal Roach the producer of the Laurel and Hardy films.   

This actually caused MGM to dump Hal Roach which is why the last Hal Roach films are produced by United Artists.  That’s another fine mess he got them into.  It sure is.  Sadly there was never a Laurel and Hardy and Mussolini crossover – probably because Chaplin was already working on the Great Dictator…

Anyway I digress.  The novel/film take quite a few historical liberties but actually the story is quite good so who cares... and ... The scale of this film (which cost me £1 on ebay) is so impressive.  In the final scenes although some stunt men were used six foot five boxer “Buddy Baer” really is wrestling a live bull and ended up quite badly injured...

There are lots of lions and tigers too although Mervyn Le Roy complained that they really didn’t like the heat and any time he tried to herd them into the arena they’d just run back into the shade.  In the end he concluded it was highly unlikely that any lions would have eaten any Christians at all ever in reality as they’re basically nocturnal creatures… 

...not that I read any of this up it's all in F. X. Freeney's incisive commentary which is so much better than listening to a lot of actors waffling ... for obvious reasons most of the cast are now unavailable to waffle.

Brighton Rock...

 

At the moment I am still trying to make the not-lockdown-unless-you’re-in-entertainment go away by watching old films.  The other night I watched Brighton Rock again for the first time in years.  Watching it older and wiser I saw it very differently which is always the way.  For one thing this time out I was painfully aware what a terrible gangster Pinky Brown (an incredibly young Richard Attenborough) is. 

I knew from watching it years ago that he and his gang are meant to be a bit rubbish but it was painfully obvious this time round that one of the problems with Pinky is he’s ludicrously over promoted.  The gang’s previous boss Kite has been murdered in an off screen backstory which is too complicated to explain and the film really charts how the gang which had once been fearsome falls apart under Pinky’s new management.

Pinky is a psychopath which doesn’t help social cohesion within the gang and his number two Dallow (William Hartnell pre Doctor Who) talks a good game and looks the thug but is actually a bit of a coward who uses Pinky to do all the dirty work.  Pinky’s gang is actually modelled on the Sabini racetrack gang of the 1930s (who also appear in Peaky Blinders) and apparently one of Sabini’s henchmen was brought in as an advisor to show Richard Attenborough how to behave with a razor.  There’s a sentence one doesn’t write every day.

The theme of the novel is determinism with Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold the entertainer turned investigator who claims that Pinky is incapable of change.  Well, he does appear to be a stone cold psychopath but is he really beyond redemption?  He actually spends a lot of the film trying to sell the firm out in different ways.  By the end of the film he and Dallow have completely sold out to a rival firm as theirs has collapsed … is he actually trying to get out?  Or is he just completely ruthless and good or bad at calculating the odds?  Perhaps?  Or perhaps it’s Dallow (one of nature’s number twos in every sense of the word) who wants to get out more and is more ruthless in knowing Pinky is a pyschopath and goading him on to more and more murders?  By the point at which they take a bung to close down it's just Pinky and Dallow and without Dallow's support …

Hermione Baddeley is fantastic in this film.  The scene where she’s engaged in a musical dance number with a line of other performers dressed in clown costumes and spots Pinky in the spectators and he spots her is brilliant.  So much is said without a word being uttered – except, of course, the utterly inappropriate words of the song…

Carol Marsh gives an interesting performance as Rose despite never having had any acting training.  The Boulting Brothers put an add in the paper for someone “frail, innocent, naive, and tolerably but not excessively pretty.”  Carol said that “People were very, very cruel. Why didn’t they just leave me alone? ... I’ve never seen the film and I couldn’t bear to ….” And claimed she was “preyed upon” during the filming.  By whom one wonders? But any #metoo scandal will have gone with the cast to their graves long since…?

The ending  – invented by the Boulting brothers to avoid any more displeasure from the censors than having Richard Attenborough slash people with a razor had already created - and hated by Graham Green is one of the best ironic twist endings in a film ever and says so much about Rose and Pinky's abusive relationship.  Watching it again one started to see her less as the innocent and more as a knowing gangster's moll who's in on the skullduggery.  Of course she's meant to be 16 (actually she was 21) but never-the-less the film asks difficult questions about personal culpibility and complicity.