The Deceivers

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Bernard Montgomery, Christopher Priest, Clifton James, David Fisher, Dudley Clarke, Dusko Popov, Erwin Rommel, Glyndwr Michael, Jasper Maskelyne, John Mills, Joshua Levine, Juan Pujol, Nicholas Rankin, Winston Churchill

A year or so back, I came across a television broadcast of the old 1950s film, I Was Monty’s Double. It is not a very good film (Clifton James was not a particularly talented actor), nor was it an especially honest film (at least two better, and better known, actors were approached to take part in the deception before James; James was a drinker, who brought the deception to an end earlier than planned because he was drunk and Montgomery was a strict teetotaler; and the whole drama involving the John Mills character never happened); but I found myself intrigued yet again by the whole notion of wartime deception. This particular deception, Operation Copperhead, as it was called, doesn’t seem to have had much if any effect on the German war effort, but still the whole idea was just so bizarre.

Also, it reminded me of another film of similar vintage about another, and far more effective, wartime deception. And lo, The Man Who Never Was showed up on television just a little while later. What’s more, not long after that a different channel was showing a documentary, Operation Mincemeat, which filled in some of the details that the film missed (including giving the name of poor Glyndwr Michael, which hadn’t been released at the time the film was made, and who is one of the few civilians in the Roll of Honour on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website).

I Was Monty’s Double was a fairly simple deception: make Montgomery appear on Gibraltar and in Algeria, and the Germans will think the D-Day planning is not at an urgent stage, and maybe relax their attention a bit. The Man Who Never Was was a much more complex deception. Have a body wash up off the coast of neutral Spain as if he had died in a plane crash, have the body carry secret documents suggesting that the allied invasion of Southern Europe would be through Greece not Sicily, and then hope that the massive network of German agents operating in Spain would get hold of those documents and believe them. As if that wasn’t complex enough, they had to find the right body whose actual cause of death would not be detectable to Spanish pathologists (as it was, the body was kept on ice for so long that signs of decay were starting to show in the extremities by the time he was pushed into the sea off Huelva); then they had to create an entire backstory to make “Major Martin” appear like a real person and like someone who would be carrying such documents. What’s more, the documents contained a double bluff, since they referred to the actual plans for the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, but as if this was itself a deception to distract the Germans before the real attacks on Greece and Sardinia. It worked like a dream, Rommel along with masses of men and armour were actually moved from Sicily to Greece, then sat there with nothing to do throughout the Allied landings.

The more I learned about Mincemeat, the more complex it became. And then, in one of those instances that make you question the whole efficacy of algorithms, I was searching guitar tutor sites on Youtube when suddenly I came across a documentary about Operation Fortitude. Now, I knew vaguely about dummy armies being massed in Kent during the run-up to D-Day, but I knew no details, and I didn’t know it was called Fortitude. But the documentary did no more than whet the appetite, I had to know more. So I went out and got three books on the subject, as you do.

The first of these, Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 by Nicholas Rankin, would, I hoped, provide me with a good basic overview of the subject, which would allow me to fill in details later. And I suppose it did, to an extent, though not the extent that I’d hoped. This is partly because he keeps coming back to Churchill, even though Churchill himself was rarely more than tangentially involved in any of this; he likes to give detailed accounts of campaigns and battles which often involved little in the way of deception; and he is too easily distracted, an account of radio deception spends several pages talking about Tommy Handley and ITMA. If he had kept strictly to his subject, a 600-page book would have been closer to 300 pages, and all the better for it. Nevertheless, what is in there, for instance on camouflage in the First World War, is often very good, though I could have done with more detail, for instance, on how fake buildings and patterns of light and fire were used to deceive German bombers. What I particularly like is being introduced to

Dudley Clarke in and out of his Madrid ensemble.

the extraordinary character of Dudley Clarke, brother of T.E.B. Clarke who would write so many of the great Ealing Comedies. Dudley seems to have expressed the family’s creative genius in the form of some of the great deceptions of the Second World War. It was Dudley Clarke who came up with the idea of the commandos, and later in North Africa decided to trick the Germans into thinking there was an elite commando unit operating behind their lines which he called the Special Air Service, only for David Stirling to think that was a good idea, and turn the deception into a reality. Then there was the curious incident in Madrid when Clarke was arrested by Spanish police in women’s clothing; no one has quite managed to work out what he was doing in Madrid or why he was in drag. Don’t you just want a full biography of Dudley Clarke?

At the opposite extreme to Churchill’s Wizards is The War Magician: The Man Who Conjured Victory in the Desert by David Fisher, which is the story of Jasper Maskelyne. Now I was interested in Maskelyne because he came from a family of stage magicians, his grandfather John Nevil, and his father Nevil, were both renowned magicians (and one or other of the Nevils, I suspect the elder, played a significant part in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige). But this is probably not the book to read. Fisher writes it like a bad novel, with conversations that could not possibly have been recorded (including one conversation between two men as they die alone) and lots of sentimental asides about Jasper and his wife. There is no source given for anything he tells us, and though he says at the start that some of the characters are composites we have no indication who these might be. But more than that, I don’t believe it, there are details that are simply wrong (Dudley Clarke is described as the head of a spy network, but Clarke had nothing to do with spies in that sense, and as the person in charge of deception throughout the North Africa campaign he would have been Maskelyne’s commanding officer) and others that are misleading (a number of the deceptions that Maskelyne is credited with inventing are variants of things being used extensively elsewhere). I don’t doubt that most if not all of the deceptions described in this book actually happened, I just think that Maskelyne’s role is being massively over-inflated. Rankin says as much in Churchill’s Wizards: “Maskelyne’s theatrical charisma has cadged him more credit than perhaps he deserves” (that “cadged” is a nice touch); but I think I would have doubted this book even if I hadn’t read Rankin first. (I’ve just checked on Wikipedia, which says that his very brief command of the Camouflage Experimental Section was not a success and he was transferred to welfare, ie, entertaining the troops, and that according to official records his wartime role was very marginal.)

Still, the deceptions that Maskelyne was, or claims to have been, involved in are quite spectacular. These include fooling German bombers into attacking an empty bay instead of the crowded harbour at Alexandria, and using dazzling lights so that pilots could not aim their bombs accurately at the Suez Canal. Most spectacular was the preparation for El Alamein. Rommel knew that Montgomery would have to attack somewhere along a relatively short and distinct line, but he did not know where or when. The allies started creating a water pipe towards the south of the line: this would be essential for supplying any advance, but the rate of construction was such that it could not be completed before November. Meanwhile supply trucks were parked and forgotten at the northern end of the line, while tanks were massed at the southern end, then, in a carefully stage-managed operation, the tanks were transferred to the northern end where they were disguised as trucks, while fake tanks replaced them at the southern end. When the attack came at the beginning of October, it took the Germans completely by surprise.

This deception, of course, recalls the preparations for D-Day, which brings me to the third and by a long way the best of these three books. Operation Fortitude: The Greatest Hoax of the Second World War by Joshua Levine tells a story that is more complex and more wide-ranging than I had ever imagined, and Levine tells it in a way that is compelling without reverting to the fake novelistic mode of Fisher, full of telling detail that is both more succinct and more convincing than Rankin’s rather long-winded manner.

It turns out that the fake tanks and the rest in Kent were largely irrelevant to the deception, because by this stage in the war the Germans didn’t have the facilities for reconnaissance flights. They were entirely dependent on their agents on the ground, and though they didn’t realise this, they didn’t actually have any agents. I have long heard the story that every German agent in Britain during the war was either captured or turned, but I didn’t know the details. Levine very carefully lays out how Operation Fortitude was almost entirely a product of the Double Cross system. Germany doesn’t seem to have thought to put any agents in place in Britain before the war, and the first ones they tried to infiltrate once war began were singularly incompetent and ill-trained. Some barely spoke any English, most seem to have had no knowledge of the geography of the country, all were rounded up within a day or so of landing. Of these, most were happy to play along with their British captors and start relaying false information back to their handlers. That was the tentative start of the double cross system, but it really got going with the appearance of two extraordinary characters. Dusko Popov was a Yugoslav lawyer and playboy (who may have been one of the inspirations for James Bond) who got himself recruited by the Abwehr, then went straight to the British and volunteered to be a double agent. Throughout the war he ran a string of fake agents in Britain that kept Germany informed of everything we wanted them to know. Then there was Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spanish chicken farmer who volunteered himself to the Abwehr only to sit in Lisbon making up stories based on a tourist guide and an old map of Britain. At one point he told his German handlers that a Glasgow workman would reveal any secret for a litre of wine, and nobody in the Abwehr blinked an eye. It took him several attempts to get the British to take him on as a double agent, but once they did he set up a network of fake agents even bigger than Popov’s, and remained Germany’s most trusted informant right up to the end of the war. With Pujol and Popov in place, and the dozens of agents they apparently controlled, the Abwehr decided it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to infiltrate any more spies, which is how Britain (through the Twenty Committee, the XX or Double Cross Committee, led by our old friend Dudley Clarke) more or less dictated everything the Abwehr knew throughout the war.

What I like about Levine is that he is not only a good storyteller who clearly relishes the various deceptions he describes, but he is scrupulous in showing how well or ill they worked. Fortitude was in two parts, for instance. Fortitude North suggested an army being amassed in Scotland ready to invade Norway, and though this seems to have worked to the extent that it kept German troops in Norway that might have been transferred elsewhere, that force was not huge and was not augmented by additional forces. So Fortitude North was not exactly a resounding success. Fortitude South, on the other hand, had the advantage that it was trying to suggest that the European invasion would come at the Pas de Calais. That was the obvious location for an invasion, and both Rommel and Hitler believed that that is where it would happen, so the deceivers were preaching to the converted. So successful were they that even after troops had landed at Normandy they were able to convince the German High Command that this was just a feint and the real attack would follow at the Pas de Calais once the troops there had been drawn away. Before D-Day, Eisenhower asked the deceivers to keep the Germans tied down at Calais for three days; he actually got more than two weeks.

Apart from the Levine, there have to be better books about the hall of mirrors that is British wartime deception. But even so, the stories they tell are endlessly intriguing. I have a feeling I’m developing another obsession.

Churchill!

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Brian Cox, Gary Oldman, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill

The queue for the afternoon showing of Darkest Hour was made up of people who weren’t quite old enough to remember the events of the film. But I think they wanted to believe they were. Half a dozen places ahead of me, one woman clearly had no idea of the title of the film she was here to see and so stood dithering for some time trying to think which screen to choose. At last inspiration struck: “Churchill!” she declared in a glass-shattering yelp that must have been heard in France.

That’s what this is about: just old reliable Winston, the man half the population of Folkestone believes should still be leading the country. Darkest Hour is an entertaining enough film redeemed by a mesmerising performance from Gary Oldman under an ocean of prosthetic makeup. But that is precisely what bothers me about it.

This is the second film about Churchill I’ve seen in the last few months, after Brian Cox’s performance in Churchill.

This is the second film I’ve seen recently that climaxes with the “fight them on the beaches” speech, after Dunkirk.

This is the third film I’ve seen in less than a year that turns upon that invidious British myth of Dunkirk, after Dunkirk and Their Finest.

This is the fourth film I’ve seen in less than a year about plucky British wartime spirit, after Churchill and Dunkirk and Their Finest.

And I am getting very concerned about the mythmaking. I assume that the realities of film making mean that all of these films were at least conceived before the Brexit vote. But they are all Brexit films.

These are films about Britain standing alone, and of course being victorious in its isolation. This is Britain being better than, and better apart from, the rest of Europe. These are films about heroism being endemic in the character of ordinary Brits (the word “plucky” is inescapable here, even though in reality it hasn’t been used for decades). And here anyone who talks of negotiation, of talking to the rest of Europe (rather than the commands Churchill gives to his French counterpart) is a weaselly figure who’s the next best thing to a traitor (ie, Halifax in Darkest Hour – I have no particular brief for Halifax, but her is here made into a too-convenient antagonist).

Darkest Hour is full of cringingly bad moments, such as the penchant for beginning or ending key scenes by looking directly down from high overhead, or the idea that even after he was deposed Chamberlain held such power over the entire Parliamentary Conservative Party that he could dictate whether they cheer or remain silent. But the scene that almost had me laughing out loud was when Churchill took the tube. As the girl who showed him how to read the map told us, he was going only one stop. The scene that followed on the tube train was long enough to have travelled all the way around the Circle Line. He found himself in a carriage that was full of the sort of cheerful Cockney cliches that we all remember from far too many British films of the 40s and 50s. They were all polite and smiling and unfailingly bellicose, and the black man even completed Winston’s quotation from “Horatius at the Bridge”, because in 1940 every working class Londoner knew the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay by heart.

Both Darkest Hour and Churchill show Winston boldly taking difficult decisions that will cost lives. There’s a suggestion, pretty explicit in Darkest Hour, that this somehow redeems the tragedy of Gallipoli, because Winston was of course right all along. And such sacrifice is necessary and ultimately good for us. Wipe out the garrison at Calais in what is a pretty futile gesture, and we’re all better for it. And it’s right, of course, because doesn’t Dunkirk show us that even the most ordinary British Tommy will become Herculean for surviving that miserable experience. And doesn’t Their Finest show us that we crave the myth of Dunkirk, not any truth, because the myth makes us all happy and brave.

And don’t all of these films collectively show us that we are better off on our own, unattached to the rest of Europe. And though there may be hard times, the very fact that we’re British means we have grit and pluck and will come through stronger than ever. And anyway, eventually our good friends the Americans will turn up eventually and make it all right again. Yeah, sure!

None of these films is exactly great. Both Cox and Oldman put in remarkable performances as Churchill, Dunkirk has some pretty spectacular film making, and overall Their Finest  has an unassuming levity that makes it easily my favourite of these films. But great, no, the message gets in the way of that.

When does the future begin, when did it end?

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Apollo 13, Carl Sagan, Hidden Figures, John F. Kennedy

This is a placeholder for something I really don’t have the time to pursue right now.

If you argue, as I have done, that the nature of science fiction can best be understood in terms of family resemblances, when we identify something as science fiction because it resembles something else we have already called science fiction, then popular vote awards can be interesting studies. They provide a snapshot of what is broadly identified as science fiction at any one moment. They can also provide a glimpse of the edge, the disputed territory.

For some reason the Hugo dramatic presentation category, or as it is now called, dramatic presentation, long form, is a particularly interesting case study in this respect. Right from the start the shortlisted works have been an extraordinarily wide-ranging melange of sf, fantasy, horror, non-fiction (Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was shortlisted in 1981), satire, comedy, postmodernism (Being John Malkovich in 2000) and on and on. Even so, I always considered the shortlisting of Apollo 13 in 1996 something of an anomaly.

But now there is a pretty much identical anomaly in the shortlisting of Hidden Figures.

Before I go any further, I must insist that both Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures are excellent films. Nothing I say here should be construed as a criticism of the films, I am only interested in trying to puzzle out their place on the respective Hugo shortlists.

Both films are historical dramas based on real events. Like all dramas there are moments when events are elided, when one character represents several real historical figures, or when a character is a fictional construct meant to represent the norms of the period or to fill in a gap in the historical record. Such invention is common to all historical fiction. Were such invention enough to identify the films as science fiction, then we would have to call every work of fiction science fiction. And while there is a certain interest in such a position, it wouldn’t really be very helpful to anyone; and since sf fans and critics have always been particularly keen on marking their territory, I don’t really think it would be a welcome position within the sf community.

So what is it that does make the films science fiction? Or at least: what is it that makes the films worthy of a science fiction award?

Ah, of course, they both have rockets, they both have space. Isn’t that the archetypal sf setting? Don’t they therefore have family resemblances to everything we recognise as science fiction?

But this is, in neither case, our future in space. It is our past; it is that very brief period in the 1960s when America looked upward and outward. Whatever our space ambitions nowadays, that sense of necessity, of inevitability, of excitement, that sense in John F. Kennedy’s famous words, that “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills” – all of that is missing. Indeed, Apollo 13 captures the moment it ended, (and, not entirely coincidentally, I’m sure, Hidden Figures captured the moment it began, including incorporating part of Kennedy’s speech at Rice Stadium). For Apollo 13, the film represented America rising to and overcoming a technological challenge that was all neatly encompassed within one dramatic incident. For Hidden Figures, the challenges of space were a dramatic exemplar for the challenges of racial prejudice that was the film’s core subject. Both films are about a specific time, and in both cases it is important that that time is in the past. Indeed, the most recent events covered in either film, Apollo 13, are getting on for 50 years ago. I would lay odds that a significant percentage of the voters who put both these films on the Hugo ballot were not yet born at the time of the events shown.

And yet, both films are considered, by a not inconsiderable number of core science fiction fans, to be worthy of a science fiction award.

I wonder whether what this means is that, within the science fiction world at least, we can only think in terms of our future in space, not our past in space. Any film that takes us into space is automatically about the future, even if it is set in the past. Is that so? Why? That is the thought I want to muse upon, the thought that prompted this placeholder post.

We’ll always have Paris

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Aleksandr Sokurov, Alice Rahon, Anton Chekov, China Mieville, Franz Wolff-Metternich, Grace Pailthorpe, Jacques Jaujard, James Joyce, Jindrich Styrsky, Jo Baker, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil

Sometimes, connections come at you in completely unexpected ways. By chance, you read something that sticks in the memory; months later, you see something more or less unrelated; then a little after that you read something else and an unlikely (if frail) bridge seems to be formed tying all three together.

Time of Arrival

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Amy Adams, Denis Villeneuve, Jeremy Renner, Ted Chiang, Tzi Ma

On Saturday evening we finally got to see Arrival (insert usual and deserved superlatives here). On Saturday afternoon, I came across a review of the film; I haven’t sought it out again, I haven’t linked to it, because something so wrongheaded doesn’t deserve the link. At one point the reviewer said, in so many words, the subplot about the daughter is unnecessary but at least it’s not sentimental.

Well, he’s right about it not being sentimental. Otherwise …

The Innocence of Museums

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Orhan Pamuk

I have a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the work of Orhan Pamuk. I have read only two of his novels: My Name is Red, which I loved, and Snow, which I really struggled with. But we have all of his books because Maureen loves them.

Which is a way of saying that I have not read The Museum of Innocence. Nor have I been to Istanbul (much as I would love to do so), and so I have not visited the Museum of Innocence that Pamuk set up with the money from his Nobel Prize, though I have flicked through the book about the museum that Pamuk produced a few years back. (As I write this, an exhibition related to the Museum of Innocence is on in London; we are intending to go, but have not done so yet.) I therefore approached Innocence of Memories in a state of, yes, innocence.

Would it help?

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James B. Donovan, Mark Rylance, Rudolf Abel, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks

There’s a running joke in Bridge of Spies. James Donovan (Tom Hanks) will ask his client, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), if he is worried. He has plenty to be worried about, after all, his liberty, possibly even his life, is in danger. But Abel always replies, placidly: “Would it help?”

These are men who do not show emotion, because emotion is not helpful. Which is why Donovan, who does show emotion, and who does not understand the ice in the veins of those with whom he now finds himself associated, is out of his depth in this company. And it is precisely because he is out of his depth, because he does show emotion, that Donovan turns out to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

The Prestige

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Christopher Nolan, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Nolan

This is the last of my essays about film adaptation, and inevitably it is about the Nolan Brothers’s film of Christopher Priest’s novel of The Prestige.

Slaughterhouse Five

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George Roy Hill, Kurt Vonnegut

This is another of the essays on film adaptations that I wrote a few years ago and that came to nothing. This, of course, discusses the Kurt Vonnegut novel of 1969 and the George Roy Hill film of 1972.

La Morte en Direct

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D.G. Compton

Some months ago I posted an essay that had been intended for a book on film adaptations that never seemed to happen. This is another from that set, dealing with the film version of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe.

When you consider a film that is as faithful to its source material as ‘La mort en direct’ is to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, it is worth looking at the few instances where the two differ. Not least because the film so wholeheartedly enters into the world of the novel that there are several instances where it is not immediately obvious what is going on.

D.G. Compton (in the film credits the novel is ascribed to ‘David Compton’, but his published work always appeared under the form ‘D.G. Compton’) was one of those British science fiction writers not associated with the ‘new wave’ who nevertheless flourished briefly during the late-60s and early-70s. His work was distinguished by a complex, multi-layered world-building, and by a humane characterisation more commonly associated with the mainstream of the time. That complexity and humanity are both in evidence in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, which has some claim to be considered his finest novel.

The novel is set in a very near future when death, except in rare circumstances, has been abolished. Hence, anyone who is found to be suffering from a fatal illness immediately becomes a media celebrity. The story, in both the novel and the film, concerns Roddy, a TV cameraman who has had a camera implanted in his eye, and Katherine Mortenhoe, a middle-aged woman who learns that she only has a few months to live. In the novel, she immediately becomes the focus of so much media pestering as to make her life intolerable; in the film we see a handful of bedraggled journalists outside her home, but we also see her walking alone and unmolested through a park. The amount of media attention is so much less in the film that the dynamic of the story is changed. When, at roughly the mid-point of the novel, Katherine runs away it is clear that she is trying to escape all the people who will not leave her alone; when, at roughly the mid-point of the film, Katherine runs away, it is not immediately clear what she is trying to escape.

This change, though subtle, has two notable effects. The first is that the film, even more than the novel, becomes an indictment of the intrusiveness of ‘reality TV’, twenty years or more before we actually had such a term. This is made even more overt by the massive posters advertising ‘Death Watch’ that are encountered throughout the city and that are first seen even before Katherine is introduced. At one point, we, and Katherine, see her face appearing on one of these posters. In the novel, however, her relationship with the television programme is much more ambiguous. She initially rejects the approaches from the television company, then accepts them only to acquire the cash she needs for her escape. Since she then immediately runs away, we are left to assume that right up to the end of the novel she remains unaware that the programme is actually going out.

The second effect is that the focus of the film is less on the watched and more on the watcher. The novel alternates between Roddy’s story, told in first person and beginning with Roddy’s first sight of Katherine, and Katherine’s story told in third person. The balance is even between the two throughout the book. The film opens with Roddy having his eyes tested and the focus is more on him than on her, until quite late in the film when the balance does shift to Katherine. But the film adds a brief voice-over at the beginning and again at the end, which is spoken by Tracey, Roddy’s ex-wife, who is a less important figure in the novel; this also has the effect of making Roddy the main focus of the film.

At the same time, where the novel goes to some lengths to make it plain that death is a rarity in this world (hence the media fascination with Katherine Mortenhoe), in the film this is implied but not made explicit. The programme about her, therefore, can be seen as more straightforward voyeurism, an interpretation which the concentration on Roddy, the watcher, does little to dispel.

There are several other ways in which the film assumes, without either challenging or explaining, the world building of the novel. For instance, the novel reveals that the absence of death has brought consequent social changes, thus marriage has ceased to be a lifetime commitment and has become a fixed-term association. This has no part in the film, so Katherine’s marriage to the ineffectual Harry despite her obvious continued affection for her former husband, Gerald (whose name she retains), goes unexplained.

Other elements of the novel that the film incorporates without fully explaining are less significant, though still interesting. In the early parts of the novel a lot of attention is paid to Katherine’s career. She produces romantic novels, feeding plot elements and characters into a computer which then compiles the actual book. It is a strange mixture of the artistic and the mechanical, though we learn that her own particular input makes the books she produces especially successful. It is an easy step from this to accepting Katherine as someone who will write the romantic story of her own death. All that survives of this in the film, however, is one passing reference to her programming books, and a brief scene in which she feeds clearly pre-digested plot elements into a computer.

And the means of Katherine’s escape is provided by an outlaw commune that she visits alone and at some personal risk in order to acquire the clothes that will allow her to pass unnoticed as one of the homeless. In the film this is transformed into a colourful and essentially unthreatening hippy fair that she visits along with her husband and a driver who clearly doubles as her minder. Here, rather than put into practice a carefully-planned escape, she simply runs away in the confusion.

Given the way these novel elements are faithfully incorporated into the film, even if it means that what is a carefully built-up part of the world of the novel isn’t always fully explained within the film, the differences between the two become particularly apparent. Some of these differences are part of the look of the film. Although exteriors (filmed in and around Glasgow) are true to the run-down urban reality of the novel, interiors are often highly elaborate and decorative. The doctor’s office, a very functional space in the novel, becomes almost gothic in the film, more like a room in an old-fashioned, high-class hotel. And Katherine’s home is both large and richly furnished, very different from the rather poky flat she and her husband share in the novel. This last is actually problematic, since the implied financial status tends to negate Harry’s need for money that is one of the drivers of Katherine’s edgy relationship with the television company in the novel.

More differences occur in the second half of the story, after Roddy and Katherine have met. In both versions, the meeting occurs in the crypt of a church that provides accommodation for the homeless. It is here that we first recognise that the camera in Roddy’s eye means he cannot sleep and must never be in complete darkness, a realisation emphasised in the film when Roddy must spend a night in a cell. After the two make their way out of the city, however, the differences accumulate.

In the novel there is a curious episode when the two are picked up by a passing car which turns out to belong to a senior television executive who takes them to an orgy at his home. Though this episode reveals Katherine as a sexual being and Roddy as slightly prudish, at least where she is concerned, the episode feels out of place in the novel. It is as if Compton had simply inserted a nod to the free-love ethos of the time in which he wrote the novel without really believing it himself. This whole episode has simply been excised from the film, without any loss. The next morning, Roddy and Katherine get away from the TV executive by stealing his car; in the film the only reference to this episode comes when we suddenly learn that they have stolen a car. The car, of course, allows them to get well away from an urban landscape and out into open and unpopulated countryside.

Next in the novel the pair reach a small coastal town, where they are taken in by a well-ordered community of the homeless living rough on the beach. There is a suggestion that the leaders of the community recognise Katherine, but say nothing about it; but they are clearly accepted as a couple. In the film, in contrast, the two find an isolated shack in a wild valley; there is no interaction with any community, no risk of recognition, no-one looking at the two from outside.

It is at this point in the story that the most important incident, both in terms of plot and in terms of emotion, occurs. Roddy goes into town to do some shopping and in the evening stops into a pub where an episode of Death Watch is being shown on TV. He watches a scene in which over-weight, middle-aged Katherine washes herself unselfconsciously in a country stream. It is a scene that he considered lyrical, romantic, revealing her true beauty; but it is greeted in the pub by laughter and crude remarks. It is a moment that reveals to Roddy the fact that he is in love with Katherine and that he has betrayed her. He leaves the pub, walks onto the pier above the homeless community, and closes his eyes, deliberately shutting out the light and hence, agonisingly, blinding himself.

The incident is replicated in the film, but the watchers in the pub are silent, absorbed in and respectful of the drama on screen. The element of betrayal is thus downplayed; instead we get a sense of Roddy seeing Katherine from outside for the first time, though the idyllic scenes at their remote shack suggest they have already fallen in love with each other. Roddy then makes his way back to the remote valley where they have their shack, and only when he is near the shack does he throw away the small light he carries. Immediately, rather than waiting for blindness, he begins to scrabble around for the light; moments later, Katherine appears and joins the search, locating the light and shining it into his eyes just too late to save his sight. Her involvement in this scene raises awkward questions: does she know he needs the light to avoid going blind? In which case, does she know about the implanted camera? Although it is not spelled out, answering yes to either of these questions could suggest that she is rather more complicit in the filming than we have been led to believe.

Both novel and film come together again for the final episode. We discover that Katherine is not really dying, that was a deception by the television company to set up the programme, but she could now die without urgent treatment. As they rush in sudden urgency to find her, Katherine and the blind Roddy finally reach the home of her first husband, Gerald. In the film this is a beautiful country cottage filled with classical music and expensive furniture (the film depicts a distinctly higher social class than the novel). Both versions end tragically with the needless death of Katherine, though the film hints that Roddy’s sight might be restored, a reassurance absent from the novel. In overall structure and in the incidents that make up the story, ‘La morte en direct’ is an astonishingly faithful adaptation of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, almost too faithful in that much that is explicit within the novel is only implicit in the film, and yet in the end the film seems to dodge the bleak tragedy of the novel.