The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, a 1969 novel by Gordon M. Williams, is about the cold and violent impulses of the plebes in rural England.  It inspired the making of the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs, a good picture but not very faithful to Williams’s novel.  As in the film, even so, an American man married to an English wife is forced to violate his humanitarian conscience when some Brit bullies besiege his home.  They demand that the “Yank” turn over to them a man even more morally repulsive—he murders little girls—than they are.  But the man is puny and not in his right mind, and George, the Yank, refuses to yield to the chaps, whose scorn is decidedly for a child-killer and an American.

The novel is also about what being a man means apropos of having a wife—specifically, a very flawed one.

Close to being a mere potboiler, Siege is nevertheless splendidly exciting and sharply uncompromising.  With its palatable plot, it itself would make a good movie.

In the French novel The Loved and the Unloved (1952), or Galigai, by Francois Mauriac, Madame Agathe (or Galigai) hopes that by exerting her will she will cause a young man, Nicholas Plassac, to enter a romantic liaison with her.  But Agathe is physically repelling and the efforts do not work.  Mauriac has written that, for his part, Nicholas has an “idol” he must be separated from, this being not Agathe but Gilles Salone, a fellow with whom Nicholas maintains a strong friendship.

Themes in the book include the limited power of amatory love and friendship, and when sacrifice is less than moral.  It is shown that idols go, like life itself, and there is the idea of divine love at dead ends.  About a particular character in the book, Mauriac writes, “It was as though he had agreed with somebody to meet him there,” the “somebody” being God.

Though not perfect, The Loved and the Unloved is a probing novel which certainly should be read more than once, as I have done.  In its translation by Gerard Hopkins, it was penned with lovely and clever clarity:  “that living silence of the night which is the very peace of God”. . . “She could feel in her flesh what such a night must mean to two young creatures pressing together under the tulip-tree, two creatures whose happiness she was about to sully.”  Mauriac was a writer, all right.

Books and stories.

Robert Louis Stevenson wanted Treasure Island to be a fun book.  Victor Fleming‘s adaptation (1934) is a fun movie.  Without mugging, Wallace Beery carries the production as Long John Silver.  The love of loftiness and the wise shots prove that Fleming was the right man chosen to direct Gone with the Wind, and yet Treasure Island is free of GWTW‘s deepest artifice.  It’s a robust pic, although I agree with Otis Ferguson about “the extended sentimentality”—goodbye, just desserts—at the end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope the novel The Hanging Tree, by Dorothy M. Johnson, is better than the Delmer Daves movie adapted from it, for the flick, a Western, is frequently quite dumb.  For example, the Montana townspeople here are willing to execute their only doctor (Gary Cooper) for a killing they know absolutely nothing about (it was done, in fact, in self-defense).

Yes, it is entertaining—it is gripping that Cooper gets rough with a sexual harasser (Karl Malden) who becomes a sexual assaulter (let this be a warning to YOU, Al Franken)—and Nile, Washington, where the film was shot, must be a gorgeous place.  But it’s a wonder The Hanging Tree, available on TV, DVD and Blu-Ray, is still hanging around.