Cinema

On 1 October 1950 the BBC broadcast a seemingly innocuous little play by Val Gielgud. A light-hearted and critically unremarkable political comedy, Party Manners carried a number of pointed criticisms of Labour policy, taking pot shots at egalitarianism, tax-and-spend and big government. With Clement Attlee’s party enjoying only the slimmest of parliamentary majorities and a fresh election in the offing, some BBC executives feared that Party Manners might swing the balance in the Tories’ favour. Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, chair of the BBC governors and a Labour party member, cancelled a planned repeat showing, unleashing a storm in the House of Lords. The controversy evoked memories of 1906, when Harley

Film fans look away now. Last night the latest author to add to the Bond legacy said that he did not think his version could work on the silver screen. Speaking at the Southbank Centre, William Boyd told fans that if he had wanted Solo to be made into a film he would have written sixty pages rather than over three hundred. The book, which fills us in on Bond’s World War II experiences, presents a more progressive Bond than previous incarnations. Boyd has Bond ‘walking down the Kings Road in 1969’, so the character had to change with the times. There was no mention of the word ‘girl’, either:

Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example, the quick succession of scenes establishing the friendship of Frances and Sophie is borrowed from Jules et Jim (1962), Jean Constantin’s music from Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) appears on the soundtrack, and a poster for L’Argent de poche (1976) is glimpsed on a wall just in the way significant posters and pictures appear in

In Charlie Kauffman’s Bafta lecture (a startlingly honest reflection on film writing, and well worth a listen), the screenwriter, producer and director stresses that it is of the utmost importance, when embarking on a screenplay, to write something that could only be portrayed in the form of a film, and in no other medium. He is, of course, right: for writing a screenplay, in a purely technical sense, is different and distinct from writing in its other forms. You rarely have authorial narrative and do not overly embellish with descriptions. Rather, you must distil the essence of the piece into dialogue and action. You must then describe the visual world

Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. Leonard began his career as a hack and ended it as a modern master. His rule was: ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it’. His writing became sparer over the years, perhaps reaching its purest form in Get Shorty, his best known work. His total war on adverbs and adjectives placed all the reader’s focus on his dialogue. Luckily, Leonard understood how speech worked both on the page and in the ear, and he grasped how characters could be developed through dialogue rather than description. This might explain why so many of his stories have been successfully adapted for big and small screens. The Spectator has not reviewed all that many of Leonard’s recent books;

The first Briton in 77 years won the Wimbledon championships on Sunday, but this is perhaps incidental; did you spot the real thing of note? That Bradley Cooper and Gerard Butler were there to watch him, and were actually laughing and talking to each other, like normal human beings? That’s the real story here! From the flurry of online activity about the sighting of the pair, you might be forgiven for thinking they had done something other than, well, just stand there watching the tennis and have a friendly chat, as all the other spectators (or those who weren’t instead scanning the crowd for well-known faces) were doing. Celeb-spotting at