It was a warm afternoon in London yesterday. Fortunately I was at the London Irish Centre in Camden and cooled off in the bar with a friend.
He inspired today’s post. It’s hard to know where to start but how about sticking with Corelli’s Mandolin and the war in Greece, or more specifically, Crete. Evelyn Waugh (Officers and Gentlemen) and Patrick Leigh Fermor (Abducting a General) wrote about the campaign in fiction and fact. With PLF was his friend and fellow member of the SOE, Xan Fielding. I knew about his time on Crete but either I didn’t know or don’t remember anything about his life after the war. There are other things I didn’t know.
I saw Planet of the Apes soon after it was released in 1968. The dénouement took me by surprise; a cinematic coup de théâtre. I did not know, or probably care, that the film is based on a book: La planète des singes.
Another great film is David Lean’s, Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). So British, from the music composed by Malcolm Arnold to Alex Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Now I know the film is based on another French book: Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï . Now it’s time to join up the dots. Both books were written by Pierre Bouille and translated into English by Xan Fielding.
I hadn’t clocked Bouille until yesterday at the London Irish Centre. At first I thought he was Pierre Boulez. Supposedly everyone has a good book to write – hmm, not so sure – but usually successful authors stick to their genre or tricot as Bouille and Boulez might say. It is a revelation that one man, and a Frenchman at that, wrote Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes. It’s also impressive that David Lean and Franklin Schaffner saw the potential in two such different books by the same author. I needn’t tell you about Lean, but Schaffner too was no slouch at directing: Patton, Nicholas and Alexandra, Papillon, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Boys from Brazil …
To slightly digress, I read yesterday that William Walton was considered to compose the music for the first Bond film, Dr No. But here’s Malcolm Arnold’s Kwai music and, if you are in a hurry, skip forward for six minutes to the bit you know; spoiler – there’s no whistling.