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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene audiobook review – Sam West captures the menace of this modern classic
We are not short of audio versions of Brighton Rock, Graham Greene's classic thriller from 1938 set in the eponymous seaside town. Past narrators have included Jacob Fortune‑Lloyd, Richard Brown and Tom O'Bedlam, and that's before you get to the various radio dramatisations. But few can match this narration from the Howards End actor Samuel West, first recorded in 2011, which captures the menace and seediness that runs through Greene's novel. It tells of 17-year-old Pinkie Brown, a razor-wielding hoodlum who is trying to cover up the murder of a journalist, Charles 'Fred' Hale, killed by his gang in revenge for a story he wrote on Pinkie's now deceased boss, Kite. Pinkie sets about wooing Rose, a naive young waitress who unwittingly saw something that could implicate him in the murder. His plan is to marry her to prevent her testifying against him. But he doesn't bargain for the doggedness of Ida Arnold, a middle-aged lounge singer who smells of 'soap and wine' and who happened to meet Hale on the day he was killed. On learning of his death, Ida refuses to believe the reports that he died of natural causes. She resolves not only to bring his killer to justice but to protect Rose from a terrible fate. Brighton Rock is one of several Greene audiobooks being rereleased this year by Penguin; others include The Quiet American (narrated by Simon Cadell), Travels With My Aunt (Tim Pigott-Smith), The Power and the Glory (Andrew Sachs) and The Heart of the Matter (Michael Kitchen). Available via Penguin Audio, 9hr 10min Normally Weird and Weirdly NormalRobin Ince, Macmillan, 9hr 7minInspired by his ADHD diagnosis, the co-presenter of Radio 4's science comedy The Infinite Monkey Cage investigates neurodiversity and asks: what does it mean to be normal? Read by the author. It's Probably NothingNaga Munchetty, HarperCollins, 11hr 33minMunchetty narrates her memoir-cum-polemic about her struggles with adenomyosis and the enduring problem of medical misogyny.
Telegraph
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Snuggle up with the big screen's biggest bitch
Britain after the Second World War was a turbulent and unhappy society, despite having beaten Nazi Germany. It wasn't just the rationing, austerity, drabness and bomb sites; there was also a crime wave, fuelled by thousands of deserters for whom theft and robbery were the only means of survival. There was a sharp increase, too, in marital breakdown and divorce after so many long wartime separations. As if there were not enough misery in people's lives, cinema produced a rash of films – some good, some awful, some entertainingly preposterous – about criminality and rocky marriages. This Was a Woman, released in 1948, dealt with both. The film was based on a successful play. It came from a somewhat second-division, and now largely forgotten, film company – Excelsior Film Productions – was directed by a somewhat second-division, and now largely forgotten, director – Tim Whelan – and starred a now largely forgotten, but unquestionably first-division actress, Sonia Dresdel. Most films that dealt with criminality in this period were set among lowlife (Brighton Rock, which came out the same year, is the most famous example). This Was a Woman is nothing of the sort. Dresdel plays Sylvia Russell, a woman of a certain age married to a man who is something in the City. They live in a spacious Edwardian house in a smart London suburb, have a maid-of-all-work, a refined daughter and a son who is about to qualify as a doctor, so could not be more solidly in the upper reaches of the middle class. We rapidly realise, however, that Sylvia is a copper-bottomed, old-fashioned bitch; indeed, as the film carries on, her bitchery emerges as off the scale. Despite the very good hand that life appears to have dealt her, she is both miserable and vindictive. Feeling that she has underachieved in the matter of her husband, she manifests her contempt for him and conspires to control him, to make him as unhappy as possible. His main hobby is growing prize-winning roses, so she deliberately cuts those that he was about to show. His greatest happiness is his jolly little Jack Russell, which annoys her because it has the outrageous habit of barking. She takes it to a vet and demands he put the dog down; the vet obliges. Her husband's misery is palpable when she blithely tells him she has done this, but he does not retaliate. It is a fatal moment for him, for he finally proves to her that she can do what she likes to him because he dare not fight back. Her children detect her cruelty and turn against her, but it is too late. She also tries to control them, to the extent of attempting to break up her daughter's marriage. But Sylvia is not merely a control freak: she is also monstrously ambitious, and nothing – not even her poor, harmless husband – is allowed to stop her from getting what she wants. She takes a shine to one of his old friends, who has become far more successful in the company for which he and her husband both work, with devastating consequences for her husband, but also, happily, for her. Dresdel had strikingly gothic looks that were useful in playing termagants – after this film she appeared as the shrewish wife of Baines the housekeeper in The Fallen Idol. This Was a Woman was only her third film, although she was nearly 40. Before it, she had been an acclaimed stage actress, starring in 1943 in the West End as Hedda Gabler. Her exotic central European surname concealed the fact that she had been born Lois Obee in Yorkshire in 1909. She later turned her hand to directing plays as good film work dried up. This Was a Woman was unavailable for years, but is now one of numerous British films of its vintage to be found on YouTube. There are many reasons to watch it, but Dresdel's mesmerising performance is principal among them. She is an actress whose posthumous reputation should be far higher than it is.
