The world between them

I’m re-reading Murder Is Easy before the release of this feature-length BBC version.

It could be a technically superb movie and still disappoint. It’ll almost surely give Christie the Merchant-Ivory treatment, which is wrong for her.

The recent adaptations don’t capture Christie’s spareness. No matter how faithfully they render the plot and characters, they make the scenery and costumes too pretty. They embellish what the page (wisely) barely sketches.

Perhaps if Mike Leigh were the director …

If only Nicolas Roeg had adapted one or two of the creepier Christie novels, as he did The Witches and Don’t Look Now …

As T.S. Eliot famously said: “Christie and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

(OK, he said Dante and Shakespeare, but that wasn’t what he meant.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Shakespeare-wise, I have begun reading Coriolanus. How timeless these plebians and politicians seem!

Daniel, this week, decided to say dozens of real words. Previously, he had spoken gibberish.

Walkabout (the book)

It’s been cold and very snowy, and I’m sick. This is what comes of walking outside without a coat.

Happily, tomorrow is the semester’s last day, and the stream of tutees has pretty well dried out. I sit at my work table and read. One book I’ve finished is Walkabout, the classic Outback story by James Vance Marshall. In tone, it’s very different from the movie that was made after it.

Spoiler alert!

In the novel, the death of the “bush” boy is less bleak than it is in the movie. The white girl looks at the “bush” boy with terror because he’s naked. The “bush” boy infers from her terror that he’s going to be visited by the spirit of death. Then he catches a cold from the white boy. Coupled with auto-suggestion, this is enough to kill the “bush” boy.

The white girl feels remorse and allows the “bush” boy to die with his head upon her lap. In death, then, the “bush” boy is comforted.

Still, it isn’t what one would wish to read while suffering from a cold.

End of spoiler.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin & I took Jasper to his annual veterinary check-up. He weighed 14 lbs., approximately 133% of his ideal weight. Karin & I have reduced both kitties’ rations. We’re also policing Jasper so that he doesn’t steal food from Ziva.

The naked prey

He doesn’t enjoy taking his medicine or having his teeth brushed, but, on the whole, Jasper seems less frantic than a week ago. One good sign is that he’s accepting his stricter diet. (The vet insisted we trim away some of his 13 lbs.) He begs less piteously over our meals – unless, that is, we’re having tuna or chicken.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night, Karin & I watched Cornel Wilde’s opus from 1965. I’d seen it in the summer of 2000, late one night on AMC, after a grueling McDonald’s shift.

Here is the summary from AllMovie:

In the bush country of South Africa in the late 19th century … [a] hunting party are captured by … tribesmen and grotesquely tortured to death. The only white man spared is safari-guide Cornel Wilde. … Stripping him naked and giving him a knife to defend himself, [the tribesmen] set Wilde free in the jungle, in preparation of hunting him down like a lion. … The rest of this thrill-a-minute film follows Wilde into the underbrush in his desperate, resourceful flight for life. Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey was filmed entirely on location under circumstances nearly as dangerous as the plight of its protagonist.

Roger Ebert makes scathing criticisms, all of them just. I find the movie interesting for comparative reasons.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said: “In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.” I wonder if Nicolas Roeg had The Naked Prey in mind when he made Walkabout (1971). Roeg seems to have appropriated the most striking features of the earlier movie.

Both movies are lushly colored. Both are about wandering on foot through untamed land.

There are frequent digressions from the main story to show “nature red in tooth and claw.” When the protagonists sleep, creatures crawl and slither near them. Vegetation is photographed so as to resemble the human body.

Still, Roeg performs some critical reversals.

There is the theme of black and white people together in nature. In Wilde’s story, they fight; in Roeg’s, they cooperate. The failure of that cooperation is far more ironic, far bitterer, than anything in The Naked Prey.

There are scenes of hunting in which animals are really killed. Wilde has his hunter-actors throw their spears, and then he cuts to show the speared animals collapsing. Roeg casts an authentic hunter who, in one take, chases down his prey and spears it.

And then there is the titular nudity. Both movies show some natives naked. Wilde’s look like they’re from National Geographic; Roeg’s look … indecent. When Wilde’s protagonist is made to disrobe, the foliage preserves his modesty. When Roeg’s protagonists are naked … wow.

I could go on. In Wilde’s movie, the key figures are adults. In Roeg’s, they aren’t yet fully grown: in their Edenic setting, they have all the more innocence to lose.

Wilde’s characters travel across the screen from left to right. In Walkabout, the traveling is mostly opposite: perverse, confused. In Wilde’s movie, civilization, when it appears, is a haven. In Roeg’s, it’s as unwelcoming as nature.

So: Walkabout is much, much better. But The Naked Prey is watchable. Its ingredients are distinctive and exquisite, if not so compellingly arranged. There haven’t been many other movies like it, before or since.

Little Ziva surely enjoyed it: she perched on her hind legs, her face in front of the TV.