Maggie at the movies
There isn't a section of society or the media that hasn't reflected on what Margaret Thatcher meant. Film, football, sport, cookery – they've all weighed in with their Thatcher memories when, it seems to me, all we're really doing is basically remembering the 1980s. The nation has become a nostalgia radio station, like a giant Capital Gold, over the past week. Still, I'm not going to let that stop Trash going off on one. Maggie, we know, cared little for the arts — why should she, when every play, film or standup comedian was basically slagging her off? Hate figure she may have been, but it didn't half make for a lively antagonism for writers and directors. Don't we miss having such a big target these days? The only equivalent villain these days seems to be bankers – the modern breed Maggie of course helped create. Back in the Thatcher era it was estate agents. Which is why Gary Oldman's character Bex in Alan Clarke's The Firm has always seemed to me to be the ultimate symbol of the time. Oldman himself told me that until his recent George Smiley, he was proudest of creating his yuppie-fied football hooligan character for the 1989 film. "He was a character of his time," said Oldman, "and if you look at him now, Bex says everything about the Thatcher years. That was the idea. Alan Clarke and I, we wanted to put something up there that no one had really done before yet everyone secretly knew about. Bex was a monster, but he was a monster everyone knew. He was like a British American Psycho, you know, he had money and he was greedy but he was still angry. Alan was responding to what he saw as the Tory government's total misunderstanding of the society they'd created. I loved playing Bex. I didn't need to summon up the anger, you know. I was angry. We were all angry. All those actors, all the fight scenes — it wasn't difficult for us. There was a hell of a lot of anger about."
Another Pitt closure
I've always thought Withnail and I was one of the great films about Thatcher's London in the 1980s, even though of course it was Bruce Robinson's personal memoir of the end of the 1960s. Bob Hoskins's Harold Shand from The Long Good Friday is also one of the most prescient creations of British screen, with that marvellous "Hands across the ocean" speech about creating Docklands and dreaming of the Olympics. Curiously, the film producer and distributor Frank Mannion tells me he remembers meeting Mrs Thatcher at a book signing in Cambridge and asking her about movies. She told him she loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films the best, but that her favourite line was from the film The Young Mr Pitt, the 1942 biopic that starred Robert Donat as the youthful prime minister. According to Mannion, the line that Mrs T delivered for him (which must have been penned by the film's writers, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat) went: "You've saved England through your exertions, and now we can save England by your example."
Licence to bake
"I'm embarking on what you might call my European period," chuckles Pierce Brosnan, recalling the sunlit afternoons by the Mediterranean that have characterised his recent films. He's talking about the new Susanne Bier romantic comedy, Love Is All You Need, which he shot in Sorrento on the Amalfi coast, and, of course, Mamma Mia!, filmed on a Greek island. "Making this in Sorrento was idyllic. I was expecting a nice hotel, but they found me my own 16th-century villa, the Villa Tritone, high on the cliffs, and it was wonderful. We'd have long lunches up there. Did I cook? Gosh, no. There was a cook. I can still taste the tomatoes. I can cook, actually, although I don't think I've attempted it in about 20 years. My wife has no evidence of this now I think about it. She's so good in the kitchen that I daren't, but when I was a young actor in the theatre, I used to bake bread for everyone. Had a bit of reputation for it, you know." The sight of the former 007 by the sparkling blue sea in Bier's lovely new film will doubtless bring back memories of Mamma Mia!. "On both films, I have to say, it was criminal how much fun we had. Mamma Mia! more so, I guess, because I was holed up with Stellan Skarsgaard for six weeks and we really didn't have that much to do except practise our rotten singing. Safe to say, we had a few drinks, yes." Brosnan recalled one night when the film's composers, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus from Abba, were visiting. "We all went – everyone, Meryl, me, pre-Oscar Colin Firth, the whole cast – and we took over this poor little restaurant in the harbour of Skopelos. And there was a piano there, and after a few drinks, well, that was it. We did the whole bloody show right there, all the songs, the dance routines, everything. I just hope no one was filming it."
The Boss is back
Trash is always hunting for good tunes in the movies. I loved hearing 1982's It Takes a Muscle To Fall In Love by Dutch synth poppers Spectral Display, which underscores a great scene in Antonio Campos's Simon Killer. (It was covered by MIA recently.) But I couldn't help notice that Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark, from 1984, came up twice this week. It crops up in The Place Beyond the Pines and is also sung at the karaoke bar by John Krasinski in Gus van Sant's film Promised Land. What can it mean? I blame Thatcher.
