A long flight is fine with me.  I call airplanes cybermonasteries.  I enjoy using my computer to catch up on E-mail and other work, listen to music, write and just watch movies.  But there are always periods in today’s airplanes when they won’t let me use my computer.  Compound that with the inconvenience of using one when you’re making a connection, walking through concourses, catching trains and buses and getting a bite to eat, and there’s plenty of time when you need some kind of non-electronic entertainment to get you through.  My usual solution is to buy treeware (a book) – usually a good spy novel or some kind of suspense story.  These kinds of books hold my attention well enough to keep it off the lump in my stomach from the cheap pizza I just ate so I won’t have to eat the soggy turkey sandwich I know they will foist on me when I board on the plane.

 

My selection this time was a Ken Follet novel, Night Over Water.  I’ve read a couple of Ken Follet novels, and I’ve seen some of the movies that were made from Ken Follet novels, including Eye of the Needle, and On Wings Of Eagles – both great suspense thrillers.

 

Follet is English, and the books I’ve read take place in England during historic periods.  Night Over Water is a wonderfully researched suspense/spy novel that takes place mostly on an overseas flight aboard the Pan American Clipper – the incredibly romantic seaplane of the late 1930s.  The Clipper was the first way for the common man to book a flight overseas.  Clippers ran from the U.S. to England and to the Orient.  There were only 12 of them built, and the price of admission was extremely expensive – proportionately more than taking the supersonic Concorde today by several times.  The passage was about the price of a good car.  It was an incredible novelty for the very rich to be able to cross the ocean in an airplane – in 25 or 30 hours.  It didn’t go that fast – less than 200 mph – but it sure beat the Queen Mary. 

 

The luxurious 41-ton flying monster carried 40 people on overnight flights, complete with little bedrooms and a bridal suite, and was designed to land on the ocean – not on land.  The purpose for this design was the complete lack of good-quality long runways in those days.  The planes were deployed in about 1938 or 1939 and only ran for a year or two before WW II started.  After that, civilian travel was curtailed and the planes were used by the military for the remainder of the war.  Roosevelt and Churchill both crossed the ocean in these lumbering behemoths.  By the end of the war, the military had built long runways everywhere that mattered, and the exotic seaplane was obsolete.  Today none remain.  The fascinating details of the design and operation of this marvel are a good enough reason to read the book. 

 

The story is about the fictional “last flight” of the Clipper from England to the U.S. on the day war is declared by England in 1939.  A collection of characters is furnished, complete with great backstories, heading to America for various reasons, ranging from the wealthy Fascist English Lord who had backed Hitler and must now flee from his homeland because Fascists are out of style in England, the American woman who owns a successful shoe manufacturing plant who must get home in time for a board meeting the next day to avoid a hostile takeover, the English woman who has fallen in love with an American screenwriter and is leaving her husband and her home to find a new life, the thief who is jumping bail for pinching jewelry from the rich and famous, and others with similarly interesting situations.  Follet has done a great job of building a story of this type without falling into the trap of making maudlin, petty people who aren’t interesting enough to be in a good story.  His characters are good.  And his perception of human nature is sufficient to make the situations real and gripping. 

 

A spy situation is injected into this pastiche, and the suspense reaches Hitchcock level. 

 

There’s plenty of drama, love, hate, inspiration, heroism and steamy sex to go around.  It’s a great read.  In fact the problem with books like this is I can’t put them down.  I didn’t finish the book on the flight, and I was up much too late completing the story.  I highly recommend it.

 

In the two Follet novels I’ve read, the pretty young noblewomen protagonists were the daughters of rich English lords and were both, in defiance of their lordly fathers, socialists.  This throws me a bit.  It seems Follet has positioned socialism (good) as the opposite of fascism (bad) and might even believe it himself.  If so, he wouldn’t be alone in that. England has succumbed to socialism to a great degree in the last century.

 

A little survey of English history may shed some light on this.  The first step away from the rule of force in European culture was the hallowed Magna Carta, a document that was generated in England in the 1200s.  Look it up on line and read it sometime. It’s inspiring in any case, and more so because of the era when it was generated – well before the renaissance, during the high middle ages – the period of the Holy Crusades – Robin Hood and Richard the Lion-Hearted.  In fact, it was written to rein in the excesses of evil King John, the very man who had been evil Prince John in the Robin Hood story. 

 

The Magna Carta bears remarkable bloodlines to the United States Constitution.  It gave rights to the noblemen and made them part of a greater social agreement, and it limited the right of a king to yell, “Off with his head!” and take away lands and titles without due process.  The stuck point in England is they never extended these rights on down the line.  They were kept in trust for noblemen for the most part, and this privileged class was insanely rich (Follet writes about baronial estates with acres under roof) and treated their servants, employees and suppliers with relative disdain for centuries, really.  This fact alone may have been the biggest factor in the decline of the Empire.  The English class system, better at first than the pure might-is-right monarchy systems where everyone but the king was at the mercy of the king, finally got dusty and rusty in about the 1700s, but the Brits never caught up with the times and took the step to secure rights and freedoms for the common man to the degree it existed in the United States.  The result of the eventual inevitable social outrage was a socialistic movement, beginning in the late 1800s, which finally drug the Great Empire to its knees following WW II.  Follet seems to miss that the opposite of tyranny, whether it is perpetrated by dictators or oligarchic class structures, is freedom, not socialism, which is really only another tyranny.  A man is not really free if he can’t benefit from his own hard work and ingenuity. 

 

Nevertheless, this little foible aside, his novels are well written, colorful, action-packed (but not overdone with clouds of spent shells jingling onto the floors) and heroic.  They are informative and hard to put down.

John Travolta’s film, Basic, is a gripping military whodunit.  It takes place in Panama – a hellhole full of evil things like death, spies, drugs and the U.S. military.  Connie Neilson is his sidekick (or maybe it’s the other way around) and Samuel L. Jackson is the hard case sergeant whose men hate him enough that any one of them might have been his murderer. 

 

In the beginning of the movie there’s a little bit of history.   The French tried to build a canal in Panama before the Americans came.  They were losing as many as 500 workers per day to yellow fever.  They were losing money, and they couldn’t figure out what to do with the bodies.  They ordered big barrels of olive oil, emptied them, and put a corpse in each barrel.  They sold the corpses to European medical schools as cadavers.  It made money – helped to defray the awful cost of the failing project.  This dark little introduction sets the tone for Panama as a location.  It paints a similar picture to the one in The Tailor Of Panama, from the book by John Le Carre with Geoffrey Rush, Pierce Brosnan and Catherine McCormack; a spy story as dark as any of Le Carre’s books.

 

Basic should be seen twice.  It’s a serpentine story, and when the twist comes at the end, you can be left to reassemble the pieces in your mind, wondering what you saw – like the ultimate “twist” movie, Sixth Sense. 

 

The cleanup scene at the end explains, but it should have been edited by Agatha Christie – with the main detective going around the table and orating the true events exactly.  (Like, “Mr. Jones!  You weren’t anywhere near the kitchen!  But you knew you were going to need an alibi, so you put the cheese wheel and the dirty dish in the library ahead of time to make others think you had gone to the kitchen to get them!”)

 

Once you get past the little complexity factor, the story is extremely satisfying.  It’s gritty, violent, and real.  It is also seductive.  It is a story of murder, intrigue and deception. 

 

The incident occurs on a crazy U.S. Army Ranger training mission in Panama that goes bad.  Eight or so Rangers go out, and only two come back.  That occurs up front.  The rest of the movie is about how two sleuths, Connie Nielson and John Travolta, unravel what happened.  As they question the two survivors, each tells a story that contradicts the other.  When confronted with the contradictions, each of them tells a different story, then a different story.  Each of these versions is played out as a flashback with Samuel Jackson and his Rangers, fighting a hurricane and each other, in the cordillera (mountain range) between Panama and Colombia.  Each version gets more fantastic, but somehow closer to the truth. 

 

Nielson isn’t as well known as her co-stars Travolta and Jackson, but she’s very good.  She’s been around; in Gladiator, Mission to Mars, and as the super-sexy she-devil in The Devil’s Advocate with Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino.  But I’d very much like to see more of her.  As far as Travolta and Jackson are concerned, they are as good as it gets – and this vehicle is right down their alley:  a dark little alley behind Mardi Gras-crowded streets in Panama City. 

 

 

Lost In Translation wasn't.  Lost in translation, that is.  It was very understandable indeed, and a very good story. 

That being said, it was a little slow and thoughtful for my taste.  But that is hardly a criticism.  Lots of people do lots of good things that aren't exactly suited to my taste.  I've climbed the highest mountains in Tibet seeking advice as to why everyone doesn't see things exactly the way I do, but I've never gotten a satisfactory answer.

But Scarlett Johansson will leapfrog to major stardom as a result of this film.  She was already known and respected after Horse Whisperer, winning awards at a very tender age indeed.  She was born just last week, or in 1984 or some recent time like that.  But she's good.  Very good.

Bill Murray once seemed to make a career out of being slimy.  I still blanche at the memory of Ghostbuster's Peter Venkman putting the make on the starry-eyed ingenuous young woman, leading her to believe she had psychic powers she did not in fact have.  But Bill can act too, and he aced one of the great roles of all time in Groundhog Day, an uplifting and wonderful movie that will always remain in the Top Ten for many people.

Lost In Translation isn't Groundhog Day, but it's good film.  The first third of the movie is the best.  It's a painfully funny juxtaposition of modern Tokyo's fashionable, plastic, electronic culture with Murray's tired old movie star, making a quick buck as a spokesman for a Japanese whiskey -- a job he doesn't want in a place he doesn't want to be, working with people he can't understand.  The continuing gag with the director spouting multiple lines of Japanese, after which the interpreter whispers two or three words in Murray's ear was rolling-in-the-aisle stuff.  "Is that all he said?" inquires Murray, "It seems like he said more than that."

The movie changes character.  Johansson is stranded and lonely in the same hotel with Murray and eventually they meet and strike a true friendship while touring Tokyo.  They wind up making lemonade out of lemons and having a great time.  Vicariously, we get a little taste of Japanese culture too; from the traditional and religious manifestations to the incredibly colorful Tokyo streets that make the city look like the illegitimate child of a wild weekend fling between Wall Street and Las Vegas. 

It is to the great credit of those who made this film that they avoid crossing the line with the September-May relationship between Murray and Johansson.  The movie was always tasteful, but without losing heart.  It was very real stuff.

The John Ford movie The Searchers was promoted to me as one of John Wayne’s best.  I rented it and in fact it is one of his best.  It is B&W 1956.  Ford is one of the greatest directors of Westerns from that era, in which the Western was easily the most dominant genre.  The Western defined America’s psyche during that period in a way that isn’t really equaled in today’s world.  You could compare it to Sci Fi such as Star Wars and Star Trek, but I don’t think Sci Fi is quite as dominant as the good old “shoot ‘em up” was in 1956.  Literally ALL of the TV dramas during the period were Westerns except sitcoms such as I Love Lucy.  The Western was the primary canvas for drama in Hollywood. 

 

Ford started directing in 1919 during the silent era.  He directed about 150 movies, and wrote or produced many others.  He made 24 movies with John Wayne alone, including most of John Wayne’s real classics, such as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quiet Man, Rio Grande, The Horse Soldiers, Fort Apache and the classic that is perennially shown in film schools as the model for adherence to and demonstration of to the rules of cinematography (regarding camera angles, what kind of shot should follow what kind of shot and so forth to make the action move smoothly) Stagecoach. 

 

I enjoyed The Searchers.  It was a window into the think of the era (1950s era as well as the Old West era).  The Indians were the bad guys, and the Cowboys were the good guys, for the most part.  The sets and costumes were above average in authenticity, but were altered in two ways that are signatures of the era:  The costumes were too nice for a time when people really lived a barren, collarless existence; and the main bad-guy Indian didn’t look like an Indian.  He looked like his name was probably Joe Finkelstein.  He probably lived in North Hollywood, and had to get to work an hour early to get all the make-up on so his skin could be Indian-brown. 

 

Ford knew how to produce drama and pathos, however.  He didn’t fail to portray the injustice to Indians that was a signature of the old West.  It was a footnote though. 

 

In the 1950s the U.S. had just won the war against the premiere bad guy of the last few hundred years (Hitler) and there was a realization that we had created a dominant nation on the world stage.  This concept first dawned in the Spanish-American War in the late 1800s.  The United States had up to that time been mostly concerned with internal affairs and hadn’t had a run-in with a European power since the revolution.  It was actually a pleasant surprise to all when Teddy Roosevelt rode up San Juan Hill and the American Navy whumped the Spanish in the Phillipines.  The U.S. drove the Spanish out of the Western hemisphere. 

 

The First World War helped increase confidence, but the U.S. entered the war late.  It was wrapped up within less than a year from the time the Americans showed up on the scene.  They were given a lot of credit by the allies for bringing a lot of fresh and optimistic faces to a sea of apathy and death that had blighted Europe for several years, but their real military contribution was still not clear.  By WWII though, Europe folded like a tent in a hurricane before Hitler’s forces, and the Japanese had pulled the rug out from under China, Indonesia and the South Pacific islands.  England was still free, but on the ropes, and America was the Obi Wan Kenobe of the free world.  When it was all over, there was great pride and patriotism.  America was trying to understand herself in this new light and the definition that was offered up by Hollywood was drama about the taming of the Wild West.

 

Westerns were altered from the reality of the period in which they were set, however.  The actual number of battles and shoot-outs in the old West probably weren’t nearly as great as the number of movies portraying them.  And the Indian situation was severely different.  It is true that there were a few Indian uprisings and a few burned out cabins and settlers scalped, but the situation wasn’t as prevalent as it became in the reaction of the whites.  It’s a bit like the World Trade Center, which although it is a huge tragedy, isn’t really a situation where people have to worry about being attacked by Arab terrorists on the way to work this morning, and is certainly no reason to intern everyone with an Arabic surname.  I expect that by 50-100 years from now there will be plenty of nostalgic fiction stories about terrorist plots in Kansas City or Albuquerque foiled by FBI Agents or something.  The drama in hindsight will far outstrip the reality. 

  

The Old West game was played on a field with lots of space.  When Lewis and Clark took off for the Northwest, nobody knew what happened until they came back.  Even after the Civil War and the advent of the telegraph, news of the Battle of Little Bighorn would have taken days to reach the East Coast.  There were no field radios or walkie-talkies, and before the news could be transmitted, someone had to 1) find out it happened, and 2) ride a horse to the nearest outpost of civilization.  This enormous space factor insulated even the most severe situations. A citizen of Hoboken, N.J. didn’t have to worry about an Indian attack.

  

Is the treatment of the American Indian the ideal solution to the problem they represented in the eyes of the white men of the period?  Certainly not!  The white men of the era were somewhat less sophisticated and were very chauvinistic (in the sense of fealty to a race or group, not limited to “male” chauvinism).  They believed the white man was superior and had the right to settle the West.  How did they solve the Indian problem?  With overwhelming superiority of numbers and technology.  They simply wiped the Indians out.  That was a dark solution, but it was a solution.  It was justified in the minds of those who were there.  When there is a small injustice here or there, that’s life.  Nobody’s perfect.  Unfortunately, the American “here or there” injustices included the trail of tears and the massacre of women and children on more than one occasion, including the one that pissed off Crazy Horse and led to Custer’s demise at the Battle of Little Bighorn. 

 

It was fascinating to me to recover the perception of the Old West as seen in the 1950s, including the passive acceptance of any injustice in the name of protecting the group, and the resultant wipeout of the Indian population.  

 

But I was there in the 1950s and I am familiar with the attitude Americans had about the history of the Old West and the Indians.  The “redskins” were the 1950s cinematic version of the Arab terrorists, or the Klingons, or the Evil Empire.  They were the “bad guys”.  They were the force that made it unsafe to build a home in the wilderness and carve out a life.  They were seen as dangerous, and in fact “they” were -- to a greater or lesser degree, in some areas -- although if you inspect the issue, the number of them that actually posed a threat is small compared to their total, and the others suffered a terrible fate as a result of the white man’s reaction to the few.  There were the Tontos and the Sacajaweas that crossed the cultural line, and sometimes a trapper would marry some Indian squaw and today there are lots of people that boast a small bit of Indian blood in their heritage.  But most of the Indians were herded like cattle, away from their homes and onto reservations in the most desolate part of nowhere, deprived of their lives and their culture, and forced to live in desolation and captivity. 

 

But to many in the Old West, this inhumanity was preferable to the insecurity of having the Indians in the environment. 

 

Thank you posthumously to John Wayne and John Ford for a fascinating and surprisingly disturbing picture of the fifties and the 1800s.  A side note:  The movie starred Natalie Wood as a white girl who was kidnapped as a child by Indians and brought up as one.  An interesting part for her.

I'm still flipped over the sound track from Road To Perdition.  Working to that music on headphones puts a very strange and exhilarating cast to everything else. 

The "front runners" to replace Davis as governor of California went at it tonight in a televised debate.  Tom McClintock is very sane and possibly would be the best governor among them, but can't win because he doesn't have sufficient charisma.  Bustamente's opinions sound like they should be coming from a dirt-smudged street radical and it sounds wrong coming from a man with oily speech, a haircut and a nice suit.  He is covertly hostile -- nobody's friend really.  Ariana Huffington is just as bad.  She is masquerading as a conservative but viciously attacking other conservatives for the wrong reasons, and is actually a liability to the conservative side.  I can't believe they put the Green Peace guy on there.  Is he really a front runner?  More than, say, Gary Whatshisname the actor from Diff'rent Strokes?  Given a choice I'd take Gary.  Or Ariana.  Or just about anybody.

Interestingly, before the contest, on MSNBC, they had a story about a survey that said, "California recall a tossup".  That would imply that there are no real front runners.  After the debate they had a poll on the web site, and with tens of thousands of votes counted, Arnold has 52% and the rest are fighting for small slivers of the pie.  I don't know whether the debate really changed things that fast, or whether the pollsters used by MSNBC are as slanted as MSNBC's news stories.

Arnold can and probably will win this election.

I took my octogenarian mother to the DMV today to get a driver's license, and I was exposed to the worst and the best parts of living in California.

Bad news first:  We arrived at the DMV at 8:00 AM, and there was already a long line.  We pulled our service-order ticket as soon as we came through the door, but we weren't served until 1:00 PM!  That's a ridiculous long time to wait at the DMV.  And there doesn't really seem to be an alternative.  They instituted a system of "appointments" for people so they could get around the long wait, but my mother had called several times per day for week and had never called when the line wasn't busy.  We spoke with other people who had tried the appointment route, and they said the same thing about the line being busy (and I don't mean, "Your call is important to us..." busy, I mean beep-beep-beep busy) and the ones who had managed to get through said they still couldn't use the appointment option because the appointments are now scheduled for more than a month away.  So unless your reason for going is unimportant, you pretty much have to gut it out on the bench seats, waiting for your turn number G188 while the television says, "Now serving F033".  It's frustrating!

Why is it the State of California can't support such a basic function as a Department of Motor Vehicles office?  We actually did some research, and the one we went to is one of the least busy.  It's a travesty.  I would guess the poor governor doesn't have enough money to run the DMV, but there's the odd fact that "fees" for auto licenses have recently shot up to double the amount, and the additional odd fact that California has one of the highest income taxes in the nation.  Add that to the fact that the state was billions in the black only a few years ago when this governor took office, and is now 36 billion dollars in the red (that's more than the Gross National Product of most third world nations) and you can't help but worry about the government of the State of California.  This state is one of the most wonderful and livable places in the world, but the government is hell bent to destroy it.  My partner and I have already moved most of our company out of the state for tax reasons, and have sent hundreds of jobs to another state.  But now I have to contemplate that staying in California at all costs me tens of thousands of dollars more than it would cost me to live elsewhere.  But for some reason the State can't support the DMV! 

It is time to replace the governor, if for no other reason than to protest what is probably the legislature's fault as well.  Things must change.  You can't blame the employees at the DMV.  They're all working hard and doing a good job, as nearly as I can tell.  And their lines appear to be reasonably efficient.  But there's definitely a hole in the bucket when you're being charged more to live here in general, and more to own a car, than in any other State, but they won't provide sufficient manpower or square footage to perform such a basic function.

I said we saw the worst and the best.  The best is the people of California. 

We sat in our little chairs for about five hours, waiting.  During that time we got to know everyone around us.  What else was there to do?  In our immediate purview, we met and spoke with one or more people of each of the following ethnic groups:  Thai, Armenian, Filipino, Japanese, Mexican, American Black, American White, Italian-American, and Korean.  This has to be one of the most beautiful melting pots in the world.  I hope the government is changed before it completely destroys this Eden.

Marvel Comics artist Stan Lee has specialized in flawed and tormented Superheroes for generations, and many have emerged as America's favorite comic characters.  Those heroes that we read about at the barber shop many years ago are now showing up in film and selling a lot of tickets.  Batman and Spiderman, the X-Men and the Hulk have found their way to the silver screen, and maybe soon, even my own favorite, the Silver Surfer, will find his place in the Hollywood firmament. 

The most recent one I've had the opportunity to watch is Daredevil, with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.  Like most Marvel stories, it takes place in New York or someplace similar, is very dark, and very tortured.  But it's still a lot of fun with a lot of action.  I am, however, a believer in the guy-gets-gal thing, and this movie disappoints, even more than Spiderman. 

It's a stretch that Mr. Affleck, with his easy good looks and warm baby face physiognomy represents a killer who can leap tall buildings with a single bound -- or at least leap off tall buildings with a single bound -- but these stories are a stretch in any case if you're trying to apply logic.  Garner was more believable as a karate fighter with her chiseled features and bee-stung lips. 

One of the best character actors in the business is Michael Clarke Duncan.  His massive physique and very low-frequency vocal chords definitely put him in a league alone.  It's fun to watch him in anything.  (If you want to see that he can also act very well, see him in The Green Mile with Tom Hanks.)

I won't lose any sleep over this movie fondly replaying it in my head, but it was fun while it lasted.

In the early 1960s, film was at a low point.  There were some great movies made, but in general, the product from Hollywood was more or less milque-toast.  The Cecil B. DeMilles style "blockbuster" was nearly dead.  Film production was being run by pencil-pushers and bean counters who weren't particularly willing to take risks.  There were lots of little romantic comedies that had only slightly more production value than a good TV series.  The Fly and The Thing were history.  The Second World War had been covered thoroughly.  The country was growing tired of Westerns, and even Westerns were being made with minimum production values, generally speaking, with the kind of quick hard spot lighting you still see on evening sitcoms with canned laugh tracks. 

In this film-making environment, the stage play cum film called Grass Is Greener is a better than average vehicle for the type of product that producers were willing to finance -- movies that took place in a few rooms, with a couple of long shots of the the fronts of buildings to give the story scale.   Stanley Donen directed this film to a notch above the typical fare of the time.

Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons teamed up with Moray Watson as a a "butler", to play this witty script to the hilt.  The rest of the casting was simply for story structure and there were no other significant players.  In this romantic comedy, Grant is a lord and Kerr is a lady in 1960 England.  By that time England had begun to recover from the extreme financial collapse that followed the Second World War, but Brits were still counting their pennies, and it had become standard practice, driven by necessity, for the fine lords and ladies to defray the back-breaking costs of maintaining their Georgian and Victorian mansions and castles by either renting them out or charging for tours. 

Kerr and Grant are two such gentry, and Mitchum plays the rich American who bumbles into the family and stirs up a love affair with Kerr.  The chemistry between them is an overwhelming infatuation, and Kerr begins to have second thoughts about her happy marriage with Grant as she contemplates the financial freedom of being married to an American millionaire.  Simmons plays Kerr's witty friend, and it is left to Grant to find an acceptable solution (if slightly contrived) for winning his wife back. 

The film is slightly uncomfortable because it treats the subject of infidelity a bit lightly.  These characters aren't by nature "swingers", and it is hard to believe more damage wouldn't have been done to this particular marriage by such an incident.  But the story's interesting enough, and it makes a very watchable film.  It was probably just as watchable as the stage play it once was.  But we probably would not be treated to a cast as strong in a stage production at the local theatre house. 

Most people think of the early silent film called The Great Train Robbery which was, in essence, a Western.  But in the late 1980s, Michael Crichton's book The Great Train Robbery was made into a movie with Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.  Crichton's Robbery was not at all a Western.  It was in fact a very carefully researched story of what is probably the first train robbery of any consequence -- in England, in 1855. 

The movie is fascinating, well-made, and true to the book.  Anyone would enjoy it.  But it's not a substitute for reading the book.  The missing element in the movie is Crichton's highly illuminating study of the environment in which the incident occurred.  London in 1855 was the Western world's first great city.  As a result, it was also the first place where many of the urban problems we now associate with cities occurred.  Prior to the "Great Train Robbery", which was front page news for a long time in London in the middle of that century, it had been more or less unthinkable that anyone would ever rob a train.  England had much the same attitude about their trains at that time that America and the rest of the world had about airplanes in the 1940s and 1950s and even the early 1960s.  There had never been a "hijacked" airplane, so it was unthinkable.  

In London, this particular crime was often called "the crime of the century". 

Crichton is our guide through the quaint environment of 1850s London, where sheep were still herded down the middle of the streets and cock fights and dog fights occurred in the middle of commercial areas that were the equivalent of what would now be the local mall.  There were no cars, no electricity, no televisions, no telephones, no electric lights.  Men read by gas lanterns or by candle light at night.  But a city it was, and the first great one.  It was large enough to give birth to a phenomena we now accept -- a criminal class.  This would be the professional criminal.  Not the small town concept of the man who goes crazy and hurts or kills someone, or the greedy person who robs and then tries to disappear forever.  These were men who day in and day out performed criminal acts for a living.  Pickpockets, con men and other dandies. 

The Great Train Robbery book is a wonderful read.  In my opinion, one of Crichton's best works.  Caution:  Crichton launches right into carefully exhumed criminal slang from the time.  As bright as Crichton is, he doesn't seem to realize that people go right to sleep when they run into words they don't understand.  You'll need a dictionary.  A very good one.  I had to pull some of the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary -- the 26-volume one.  Some of his terminology has not been used in 150 years, and it just doesn't show up in a usual dictionary.  In my opinion, this particular fact is the greatest barrier to this book and this movie having found a better place in the pantheons of literature and film, or at least a more successful place. 

Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law and a kid named Tyler Hoechlin are four of the five stars who made The Road To Perdition sing.  The unseen fifth was Thomas Newman, who wrote the musical score. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  Throughout the film, I was flipping at the score.  It's great!  So I bought the CD, and listening to the music makes me wonder how much I would have liked the movie without the score.  It puts a lot of magic into the film. 

Newman is the son of golden-age-of-film scorer Alfred Newman, and a cousin of Randy "I Love L.A." Newman -- so he has a pedigree.  He also has a dart-sharp feel for the noir sound needed for the background of Perdition. 

Hanks is a muscle man for a mafia-style tough (Newman) in an outlying (outside of Chicago) city in Illinois during prohibition.  It's the iciest part I've ever seen Hanks play.  The story unfolds as a highly unconventional father-son story, with plenty of heart and plenty of action.  I highly recommend it, especially to anyone who likes a touch of noir.

The film is very richly done, and with a lot of love.  The wardrobe, for instance, was all made from scratch, including the manufacture of the cloth.  It turns out the heavy wool clothing that was worn in the 30s is nothing at all like the lighter wool suits and dresses available today -- in fact nobody makes the kind of heavy wool that was used in those days, when men had one or two suits and women had one or two dresses that had to last and last.  To get the right look, Director Sam Mendes hired a fabric weaving factory in the Northeast to make thousands of yards of heavy depression-era wool and all the suits and dresses were made from scratch for the film.

The cinematography is superb, and earned Conrad Hall a posthumous oscar.  He passed away after a long career as a cinematographer that included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and more recently, American Beauty, which was also directed by Mendes.

But even if you don't see the movie, listen to the soundtrack!  It's wonderful.