I wish our government, and indeed all those who hold views on the tragic events in Yugoslavia, could spend some time in the Zhablak area, absorbing the atmosphere and studying the natives. It might cure them of their deplorable habit of regarding Yugoslavia as a country where there are “goodies” and “baddies”, and it behoves the West to take sides. Speaking from brief experience which seems to be borne out by recent history, I’d say that if they’re not all savages, they are certainly capable of savagery, regardless of race, religion, and political outlook. So when I hear of “ethnic cleansing” I am in no doubt that given time and opportunity the ethnically cleansed will clean up their oppressors in turn, and so on ad infinitum, and if we had any sense we’d let them get on with it and mind our own business.
For the first day or so we subsisted chiefly on prosciutto ham and chips, but as more of the cast and crew arrived the maıˆtre d’hôtel, who introduced himself, in fractured English, as Samuel Becket, decided that a more extensive menu was called for. He was a genial, expansive character, and I was told that he had done time for homicide; I would not malign the man, and repeat only what was common report; if rumour lied, I can only apologise.
He accosted Edward Fox and me on the hotel steps, fixing Edward with a glittering eye. “You”, he said accusingly, “are great film star.”
“No,” said Edward, “I am an actor.”
“Ah, no,” cried Samuel Becket, “you are the famous Fox. And you,” he rounded on me, “are writer. Must have fine bill of fare for film stars. You help me, so good food may be preparrit.” (“Preparrit” was a favourite word of his, sometimes pronounced “preparrate”. I do not mock his English. My Serbian or Bosnian or Croatian should be half so good.)
The upshot was that I found myself in his office, trying to translate, with his assistance, the hotel’s menu into English; he had already had a shot at it on his own, and after some study I realised that “Hemmadeks” was “ham and eggs”, while “ships patato” was easy, since we had them with prosciutto ham each night. But as we worked our way through the à la carte Sammy’s English began to flag, and I had recourse to a system which I don’t expect anyone to believe, but it’s true, and I’m sure Fox and Hamilton would bear me out.
I would point to an item in Yugoslav, and Sammy would make an appropriate noise. When he went moo, I knew we were discussing beef, grunts and baa’s indicated ham, bacon, and mutton, and his spirited clucking I took to mean chicken until, by employing a mime which I have no intention of describing, he convinced me that he meant eggs.
It was a crude system, but it worked nicely until we came to the last item, in Anglo-Yugoslav: “phlam with cheese”. I pointed to it and, so help me, he barked. Further investigation confirmed the appalling truth: the Hotel Zhablak served dog meat with cheese. I did not append an English translation when I typed the menu out, but warned the company to avoid the phlam at all costs. Their reactions were interesting: Harrison Ford registered horrified disbelief, Carl Weathers roared with laughter and Edward Fox raised one eyebrow. Robert Shaw arrived late, and when he had scowled his way through the menu, tossed it aside, and demanded: “Is that all there is, then?”, I was tempted to recommend the phlam, but desisted. After all, he was the star, and shooting would have been held up if he’d been taken ill.
I spent the first few days huddled over Carl Foreman’s typewriter in my room, trying to keep out the cold with one of Hamilton’s jerseys. It’s always difficult, looking back on a script which you’ve revised, to recall how much and what you altered, but I know I changed the ending, fiddled the beginning slightly, invented a new treachery (and a new death) for Franco Nero, and thoroughly enjoyed myself with the relationship between the British sergeant (Fox) and his American counterpart (Weathers). Fox’s casting was a wonderful piece of luck; his urbane, languid style was a splendid contrast to Weathers’ massive black presence, and they played off each other perfectly.
A problem arose with the scene in which Richard Kiel, playing a partisan, had to greet Weathers with the line: “Hallo, nigger!” and make a great show of trying to wipe his colour away. The producers were worried about “nigger”, but Weathers wasn’t—he had been coaching me in black slang, some of which you wouldn’t believe—and as I hadn’t written the scene, I was neutral, as was Hamilton. We tried various other terms, including “darkie” and “sambo”, and finally settled on “blackie”, which I’d have thought just as offensive to anyone who was going to take offence.
I’m surprised that Weathers hasn’t gone farther. He is a fine actor with expressive eyes, good looking, and with the physique of the pro footballer he once was, but he has contented himself with mostly supporting parts. He had a good idea for a film about a black American who by chance finds himself back with an African tribe, and encounters complex cultural and social problems; we talked it over at some length, but I haven’t heard that he pursued it.
I finished the scripts, and what the difference was between the “official” version for the Yugoslavs, and the “real” one I have long forgotten. Shaw’s daughter, Debbie, beavered away duplicating them, they were distributed to the cast at supper, Hamilton, the recreant, took evasive action, and I was left to deal with the actors. There wasn’t too much trouble; Harrison Ford, I remember, took me through his part with a professional care which I found impressive; Alan Badel, God bless him, shook his head at me in admiration, exclaiming: “Marvellous! What a difference!” I must have changed at least two words from the original part which he’d already seen, but that was Alan all over, and explains why I liked him as much as any actor I’ve ever worked with.
We had a read through—Shaw, Ford, Fox, Weathers, and Nero, the five principals, while Hamilton stood in for Barbara Bach and others, and I did the occasional German sentry being strangled. It went nicely, with little discussion, the highlight being the abandon with which Shaw threw back his head and bellowed a line at Fox: “Miller, you stupid git!” Why do actors love shouting? Possibly it breaks the monotony. And at the finish he delighted me by remarking: “Well, you’ve got the best part, Eddie—as usual.”
The only major problem was: who was going to kill the traitor, Franco Nero? I know I rewrote the scene, but I don’t remember whether I changed the identity of the killer or not. Anyway, in the final script the execution was to be carried out by the American colonel, Barnsby, played by Ford, and Shaw objected, not altogether unreasonably.
“I ought to kill him,” he said, when we had adjourned for dinner. “I’m the man he betrayed in the first place, and the audience will expect me to kill him.”
I suggested that was a good reason for having Barnsby do it, to take the audience by surprise, Hamilton agreed, and Shaw, having growled and glared in the direction of Ford, who was sitting innocently at the next table, finally said: “Oh, well, all right…but you’ve got to give me a line!” This was accompanied by a fist on the table—a dramatic gesture timed to perfection. Guy and I suggested a few lines, none of which was well received, I had to fight down my fatal impulse to propose something really facetious, and finally Shaw said in a grating voice:
“So Barnsby shoots him, and the audience don’t know who’s fired the shot until I say: ‘Thank you, Colonel!’”
Neat, you have to admit, and so it was done. He was, I realised, an intensely competitive actor—goodness knows why, since he could hold his own with the best in the business, and act most of them off the screen. I think back to him as Henry VIII, and Lord Randolph Churchill, or eyeing Paul Newman across the card table in The Sting, dominating the scene simply by his presence.
Perhaps he was just a natural competitor. There was to be a scene involving cliff-climbing (which didn’t get into the movie), and Shaw champed at the bit beforehand, muttering: “I’m going to bloody well kill Franco Nero at this.” In the event, which I didn’t witness, the fastest man up the cliff, ahead even of the stuntmen, was Harrison Ford. Which surprised me, for Harrison had struck me as quite the gentlest of the cast, soft-spok
en and quietly courteous, and not the one you’d expect to be first as an action man.
He had just become internationally famous with Star Wars, and his part in Force Ten was modest by comparison, but he took great pains over it. He and I shared an acquaintance in Dick Fleischer; Harrison, who during a hiatus in his film career had become a carpenter, had been engaged on building a projection room at Dick’s Hollywood home on South Rockingham when he suddenly had the chance to appear in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, and the projection room was abandoned half-finished, which had not endeared Harrison to Dick’s wife, Mickey. I gather that Harrison had emerged somewhat shaken, but eventually it all came right, for I learned later from Mickey that he had completed the projection room, which is an extremely handsome one.
Edward Fox and Alan Badel and I gravitated together, when Edward was not in his room studying to be Edward VIII in the TV series which won so much acclaim. He was one of those actors whose personality off-screen is in keeping with his professional image: quiet, humorous, unfailingly polite. Badel, on the other hand, was the opposite of his acting persona: on screen he was usually the coldest of cold fish, icy-eyed and with a voice to match, the kind of heavy who could make Rathbone or Henry Daniell seem positively jolly—and that last word is a good description of him as he really was, exuberant, talkative, given to explosive laughter, and as busy as they come.
When Edward Fox, former subaltern in the Loyal North Lancs, and no stranger to khaki, put on his sergeant’s battle-dress and stood forth for our inspection, I thought he looked pretty good—but not good enough for ex-Paratrooper Badel, who fussed round him, tugging, straightening, and exhorting, while I, at Alan’s insistence, manufactured a circlet of the little lead weights with which we used to make our trousers hang neatly over our anklets. Edward bore it with his usual patience, and I must admit that Badel had him looking fit to mount guard. He didn’t stop there. Harrison Ford emerged from the unit barber looking slightly bemused; Alan, I gathered, had been supervising his haircut.
I have said he was likeable, with his happy enthusiasm and unfailing good humour; he was also a very hard man indeed. On the one hand, there was the brilliant classical actor, one of the great Romeos and for many the one and only Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, a splendid mimic who did a superb Gielgud and a truly cruel Olivier. “Larry would try to psych you out, you know. He quite upset Michael Redgrave, but when he tried it on with me, looking down his nose from a great height—” Alan was quite short, perhaps five-seven or-eight “—I fixed the bugger. I just stared at his fly buttons.”
On the other hand, there was the man who told us straight-faced that when he had caught hooligans vandalising his car, he had broken their wrists—I can still see Edward Fox’s look of horror at this revelation. For there was no doubt it was true; the war taught cold-blooded ruthlessness to a generation, and produced many walking paradoxes, trained killers who were also kind and sincere Christians. Alan was a devout Roman Catholic, and genuinely compassionate; I’ve no reason to doubt the story that he had spent an hour on the telephone using all his charm and tact (and probably his acting ability) to persuade a hysterical girl not to commit suicide; it was at the time of his Stratford Romeo, when he was being bombarded with worshipping messages and confidences from admiring females.
But the old Airborne man was never far from the surface, as William Dieterle, the German director, discovered on the Hollywood set of Salome, in which Alan appeared with Rita Hayworth and Charles Laughton. Dieterle was, in Alan’s description, “a typical Hun”, and when he slapped the face of an unfortunate gofer he found himself confronted by an icy Badel.
“I told him, ‘Look, mate, I’ve just spent five years putting down your bloody countrymen, and I don’t mind adding you to the list. You don’t slap anyone while I’m around, see?’ And he didn’t.” Which may explain why Alan’s Hollywood career was comparatively brief—that and his spirited objection to changes made in the Salome script to the words of Christ as given in the New Testament; this ended in confrontation with the celebrated Harry Cohn and a writer who explained: “Well, you see, Alan, we thought Jesus sounded just a bit cocky in there.”
With the script complete my job was effectively over, and I was able to spend time with Kathy and two of the children who had flown out to Zagreb. I rejoined the unit later, for the life of me I can’t think why, for all that stays in memory is an argument with Robert Shaw about rugby—he had played at county level, for Cornwall, I think—and a rain-sodden afternoon on a bleak hillside watching him and Ford hitting German guards with shovels while Barbara Bach shot them with a tommy-gun.
I didn’t see the film until many months afterwards, but in the meantime, near the end of shooting, I received a letter from a friend in the unit which read, in part: “Eddie as always is a delight, Barnsby grows on one, Shaw is competent when sober.”
Poor Robert. He died only a year later, of a heart attack; he was only fifty-one. A multi-talented man, not only a fine actor but a gifted writer, and it is good to remember how he threw off his customary gruffness and became positively cheerful in telling me about his latest play, which was half-finished and, he believed, the best thing he’d ever written. But being Robert Shaw it was not long before he was giving tongue to his vexation at the mounting expense of the golf course he was having built on his estate in Ireland, and the cares of fatherhood—he had, I believe, ten children. “God, d’you have any idea of the cost of kids’ shoes? Yes, of course you have.” Brooding pause. “Not as much as I have, though.”
I got no writing credit on Force Ten in Britain, which I thought a bit hard, since I’d contributed a fair amount, but I was given one in America, which was a consolation. Carl Foreman’s typewriter, I’m afraid, is still somewhere on a hilltop in Yugoslavia.
ANGRY OLD MAN 6
Crime and Punishment
FEW THINGS infuriate the ordinary citizen more than liberal attitudes to crime and criminals. And not only infuriate, but offend against justice, common sense, and fair play. The ordinary citizen is neither a brute nor a sadist; he is humane (as most liberals are not), he is compassionate when it is called for, leans over backwards to be fair, and is ready to give a second chance. But he knows the difference between right and wrong, and has an instinctive sense of the difference between right and mere legality. He believes that wrongdoing should be punished with appropriate degrees of severity; deep in his understanding lies a feeling that eye for eye and tooth for tooth is not without merit, and that the punishment should fit the crime.
He is disturbed at the way in which liberal concern seems focused on the criminal rather than the victim. He grits his teeth when he reads of young offenders being sent on luxurious safaris which honest folk cannot afford, of derisory sentences handed down for heinous crimes, of criminals who hold the law and society in open contempt, of old, helpless folk battered and tortured and slain, and of little children raped and murdered—and knows that the law of his land decrees that not a finger must be laid on the perpetrator, assuming he is caught, which he probably won’t be. He is justly furious when the vilest of criminals, the Bradys and Hindleys and Krays, are the subjects of campaigns for their release, when every decent instinct tells him that they should have been dead long ago.
He is tired, almost beyond anger and disgust, of liberals who insist that rehabilitation of the criminal must have priority, that he must be “understood” rather than punished, that our prisons are a “national disgrace”—which they are in that they are far too soft and shockingly run—and that he, the citizen, is some kind of vengeful monster when he suggests that a harsher way with criminals might be tried with advantage. He is tired of being called a barbarian, and uncivilised, when he knows that the true barbarians are the liberals who by their policies have turned Britain into an open sewer, have encouraged the criminal, and so undermined the forces of law and order that the citizen can no longer count on that protection which is the first duty of a civilised state.
H
e knows that those who brought about the abolition of the death penalty and corporal punishment (both, he notes, in defiance of the great majority of public opinion), who “reformed” the penal system so that hard labour became a thing of the past and prisoners were given sheets on their beds, television to watch, and recreational facilities denied to many outside prison—he knows that they are the criminal’s friends, their aiders and abettors, and, it follows, the enemies of the law-abiding public.
This statement will be scoffed at, of course, but we, the public who do not believe in putting the criminal first and the victim second, know that it is true. We know that chatter about being tough on crime and the causes of crime is just a politician’s silly lie, and that absolutely nothing will be done to combat crime until there is a return to common sense by treating the criminal as an enemy and dealing with him accordingly. But that, of course, is something that no politician would dare to say, even if he believed it, which most of them probably do not. Why should they? They’re all right, Jack, and when a beleaguered householder shoots a burglar and, against all decency and reason, is sentenced to life imprisonment the liberal lobby shake their heads censoriously and agree that he has no right to effective self-defence.
A thought occurs: Mr Blair and his kind presumably have armed security—so if, in the undoubtedly worthy cause of protecting Mr Blair, a security man were to kill an intruder, would the security man go to prison for life?