Lejink

Adapted by Stephen King and director Frank Darabont from King's novel, "The Green Mile" is a 1930's-era prison drama containing mysterious, supernatural elements. Framed by the retrospective recollections of the central Tom Hanks character's much-aged older self, we see him at last unburdening himself to a female friend in the care home for the elderly they share.

Cue the extended flashback sequence, going back all the way to 1935, when Chief Prison Guard Hanks and his colleagues, played by David Morse, Jeffrey LeMunn and Barry Pepper are apparently the exclusive custodians of the Death Row section of the prison where much of the action is contained. Hanks and his team use a humane and common-sense approach in dealing with the felons in their charge and are broadly supported in this by the similarly-minded governor, played by James Cromwell. There is however one other member of the team, Doug Hutchison as Percy Wetmore, the favoured young nephew of the State Governor, who has a cruel, sadistic streak which he seeks to exert over the prisoners. Hanks and co do their best to rein him in, but have to walk a thin line in case Percy runs squealing to his powerful relations.

The arrival of two very different new inmates infuses the narrative. Firstly, at the movie's outset, we see Michael Clarke Duncan make his extraordinary entrance as John Coffey, a huge black man, convicted of the rape and murder of two young white girls. However he has a meek, submissive manner and clearly will be no trouble inside, unlike the next arrival, the psychotic young white murderer, "Wild Bill" Wharton played by a crazy-eyed Sam Rockwell.

When Percy takes exception to the jeering of Michael Jeter's prisoner Frenchy Delacroix, he wangles a way to arrange to officiate at his execution, exacting a terrible revenge for his injured pride. This, combined with what we've already seen of the remarkable healing powers of John Coffey, will lead to a series of near-unbelievable events as the truth is revealed about the young girls' murders and just desserts are duly meted out to the deserving parties even as Coffey himself can't escape his own inevitable fate.

The episodic film narrative unavoidably reflects the author Stephen King's highly publicised experiment of serialising the original book which he did in cliff-hanging instalments, in the manner of Charles Dickens, indeed I remember reading it in this way in a national Scottish Sunday newspaper of the time. By adhering to this approach in the film adaptation, director Darabont gradually ratchets up the mounting tension and excitement leading up to the highly emotional conclusion. It's almost impossible not to see Coffey's sacrifice in the light of Jesus Christ himself, (whose initials he uncoincidentally shares), especially after all the miraculous works we've seen him perform.

The movie has to juggle some weighty themes, including racial tolerance, capital punishment and that old-time religion which believes in the miraculous powers of the Christ figure, but director Darabont displays a Capra-esque deftness in so doing. He's helped in this by the empathetic acting of his cast, led by Hanks and Duncan in particular, not forgetting the rodentastic performance of the little mouse, Mr Jingles.

Whilst I didn't think that the film particularly benefited from the Hanks' character's Methusalean overview, this was nonetheless a moving, feel-good movie that proved to an old nostalgist like me that they do still make them like that anymore.

If you heard a rumour that this 5-part Channel 5 production was a sharply-written, well-directed and brilliantly acted contemporary thriller, well, you didn't hear it from me. On the contrary, I found it to be so much sensationalist, far-fetched nonsense full of clichéd characters and situations, to the point that the only praise I could bestow on the cast was their not breaking out into laughter as the script lurched ever further into silliness.

If the programme was adapted from a recent novel as the credits indicate, I can only assume it's one of those books you pick up for free from the exchange-shelf at your local supermarket as I'd hate to have paid money for it, no matter how little.

The plot is the latest to derive from the awful Jamie Bulger case, where an innocent young toddler was brutally murdered by two eleven-year-old boys, who were later released back into society with new identities for their own protection. The offender for the purposes of this story, was a young girl called Sally McGowan who some 30 or 40 years ago, at around the same age as the Bulger murderers, barbarically stabbed an infant boy to death. The drama here kicks off when Rachel Shenton's young mother Joanna escapes her failing marriage by coming to the small town of Flitfield where her mother, Joanne Whalley has settled years before. Highly protective of her primary-school age son Alfie, Joanna has emotional baggage of her own, going back to a troubled childhood where she has a recurring nightmare of setting a doll on fire in her own bedroom as a little girl. Anyway, she gets a job at the local estate-agent, managed by the wimpiest, least-likely looking lothario you'll ever see, although you can at least understand his motivation to get out from under his scurrilous, domineering wife. Reading up the local news on-line to see what's happening, she picks up on a stray thread which claims that one of the townsfolk is the killer McGowan, now grown into middle-age and living in anonymity amongst them. Seeking to ingratiate herself into the clique of young mothers, she lightly passes on this titbit of gossip which naturally takes flight almost immediately and becomes the talk of the town.

It is, of course, particularly bad news for any middle-aged women-around-town who have ever harboured secrets in their past, (which is pretty much all of them!), especially when it seems someone is now trying to kill them off one-by-one. And so it goes, with Joanna playing the blundering amateur detective, handily identifying one new suspect after another for the killer who's obviously got links to McGowan's young victim years ago, before the two big reveals at the end of firstly the real McGowan, (who should really have been called McCoy!), which isn't too difficult to suss as she's the only untainted granny-type left standing and secondly the unhinged present-day relative out to revenge the young boy's death from years ago. Naturally, Joanna is in the thick of it at the climax, which of course has to involve a really big fire, the better to help her come out the other end duly purged with all her bad childhood memories literally burned away.

Honestly, I wish I had a match to set light to the script of this ridiculously contrived hogwash which had more connecting parts than a Meccano set. The acting too was routinely bad by all the participants, but especially by Shenton, in particular her big emotional scene with her mum, which will send you running behind the sofa more than any of the supposed cliff-hanging scenes elsewhere in the narrative.

The fact is, I'm afraid, that in the end, this latest Channel 5 drama just isn't worth talking about.

On some levels this Bogart vehicle is just that, incorporating a rehash of the character and situations he's played out before, most obviously in "To Have and Have Not" and "Casablanca" (indeed, the dialogue at one point requires him to almost repeat verbatim the latter's famous "Here's looking at you kid" line). Once again, he's a displaced adventurer, looking to rekindle an old romance while he gets himself sucked into a healthy dose of foreign intrigue, which you just know will end up compromising him to the extent that he'll be placed in a major moral dilemma requiring yet another self-sacrifice.

The slight differences this time are that a child features prominently in the plot, adding a further human dimension to his predicament and also that the setting is post-war Japan.

Bogart's character has returned to Japan at the war's end, to check in on the old "Tokyo Joe" bar he owned before the war but gets a shock when he learns that the girl he'd left behind, and believed had subsequently died in the interim is actually alive and well and married to a senior American diplomat played by.

His initial aim was to stay in town and establish his own private air charter service, but now he determines to reclaim his girl, who it seems still has feelings for him and besides whose is the little girl's father anyway? Plots criss-cross further as a Japanese crime boss seeks to blackmail Bogart into smuggling ex-Japanese war criminals out of the country using his plane to do so.

It all ends up in another late, late shot at redemption for our hero, the action culminating in a final shoot-out in the hotel basement next door to "Joe's".

Bogart, sure enough, plays it again, his familiar persona that is, but he's not greatly stretched by what he's given here, but I did appreciate the back-up playing by Florence Marly as the girl singer, now mother, torn between two lovers and Alexander Knox as her current husband.

I'd honestly never heard of this Bogie film before, and whilst it clearly isn't one of his absolute screen highlights, it nevertheles has just enough of those foolish things, ambiguity, thrills and romance to if not quite make my heart a dancer, then to at least keep it beating for its 90 minute duration.

Apropos of nothing, I thought to add a little postscript connecting this movie to the veteran British rock star Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music fame. Not only was his first solo album entitled "These Foolish Things", a song featured prominently in this movie, it features his own very distinctive and well-known version of it. Moreover, he also later wrote and recorded a song of his own called "Tokyo Joe" which was a UK hit single. Oh, and with Roxy, he'd earlier written and recorded another tune called "2HB" in which he clearly references Bogart throughout the lyric.