Red Riding: formats

There is some confusion over the broadcast formats of the the three Red Riding films, so I’ve taken a screen grab from each film and measured each image in terms of the pixel matrix to calculate the aspect ratio.

Andrew Garfield as the young reporter in Red Riding: 1974

I calculated this image to be 1086 x 608 pixels on my computer screen (it’s scaled down here) and that equates to a screen ratio of 1.79:1. I may be one or two pixels out given the way I use the grabbing software, but no more than that, so I’m fairly confident that the Channel 4 image is 1.78:1 , i.e. the standard 16:9 of the modern widescreen TV set.

Paddy Considine as Peter Hunter in Red Riding: 1980

The interview of the 'Wrong Man', Michael Myshkin in Red Riding: 1983

Using the same procedure on the grabs from 1980 and 1983, these came out as 1086 x 476, equating to a screen ratio of 2.28:1, which is slightly less than the cinema projection standard for CinemaScope of 2.35:1. I find this a bit strange. No doubt Channel 4 alienated a small proportion of viewers by showing the films in ‘Scope (especially given how murky 1980 becomes). But why compromise on 2.28? Why not 2:1 or the full 2.35? Is this in any way related to the use of Super 16 or the Red One digital camera? Or is this just Channel 4 ‘house style’? Of course, it could also be an issue to do with how the TV signal is broadcast or received. Mine came via cable, set to letterbox for my 4:3 TV set.

Monsters & Labyrinths

It is best first to make a clear distinction between the labyrinth and the maze. The former is a network of tunnels, chambers, or paths, either natural or man-made. The latter is a complex network of paths or passages, especially one with high hedges in a garden, designed to puzzle those walking through it. Commonly I think mazes refer to external networks, labyrinths to internal and usually subterranean networks.

The Minotaur

The most famous labyrinth, which has acquired mythic status, was that designed by Daedulus for King Minos of Crete. The myth tells of a monster begatted by the union of Minos’ wife, Pasiphae, and a sacred bull. The half-human, half-bull offspring, the Minotaur, was imprisoned in the labyrinth. Meanwhile Minos’ son Androgeos was slain by the Athenians. Minos won the war that this provoked and then compelled the city to send seven young men and seven maidens to Crete every nine years, where they were fed to the Minotaur. Theseus, son of the Athenian king, killed the Minotaur by successfully penetrating the labyrinth with the help of Minos’ daughter Ariadne.

Labyrinths have become potent motifs of signifiers in cinema. They usually bring their dark associations with them, providing settings for danger, violence, murder and a frightening monster. One early example would be the German expressionist horror, Nosferatu [1922]. This is one of the earliest vampire films, and the castle of Count Orlok [Dracula] presents a dark, gloomy setting, where corridors and staircases lead peril and horror. Suitably, the coffin in which the vampire count rests is to be found below ground, in a cellar. This early example has set the tone for many of the subsequent genre films, with heroes and heroines descending into darkness and a ‘fate worse than death’.

Expressionism was a major influence on the Hollywood film noir cycle, where labyrinthine plots took the protagonists and the audience into a dark and dangerous world of chaos. A classic example made in the UK, The Third Man, has a potent labyrinth. The film’s villain Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is finally hunted down in the sewers of the city of Vienna. The protagonist, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotton) tracks him down, through a series of tunnels, dark and running with the waste of the city. Their final confrontation is an apt reversal of their earlier meeting in the film, where Harry and Holly surveyed the world from the height of a Ferris Wheel.

Monster movies, whether terrestrial or alien, frequently contain a labyrinth. In Them (1954) giant radioactive ants move out of their anthill networks. By the climax of the film they are being hunted down in the storm drains of Los Angeles. The final peril is the destruction of a new Queen deep in the network.

More recently we have seen the development of the serial killer cycle, whose combination of film noir style with a psychotic killer provides the most frightening modern monster. An early example, M (1930) has the child killer hunted down in an apartment store. The searchers [other criminals] comb the whole set of rooms and corridors before tracking him down in a dark storeroom. In Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) Lila Crane searches the old house at the motel, and finally discovers the monster in the basement. Clause Chabrol’s Le Boucher (1969) features a labyrinth cave with drawings by the pre-historic Cro-Magnon man: which the film develops as an association to Popaul, the butcher and killer of the title. In Silence of the Lambs Clarissa Starling has to visit Hannibal Lector. She finds him in a cell deep inside the prison, at the end of a dark, dirty basement corridor. And when she finally tracks down the actual killer he also hides in a dark and subterranean network.

Many of these serial killers/monsters hark back to the earliest example on Crete. Sexual aberrations are common. The killers devour the young and innocent. Most commonly the hunter/investigator male, and a female helper occurs on occasions. And the idea of punishment for usurping authority frequently reappears. Se7en [1995] is a classic example of the genre that presents this last aspect. John Doe resides in a lair that is all in black. And he recites the ’sins’ for which his victims suffer, working through the seven most grievous. At the climax of the film he kills the innocent wife and unborn child of detective Mills, and fuels wrath!

This long-running motif has returned powerfully to the screen in Channel 4’s recent adaptation of the Dave Peace quartet of novels, Red Riding. The novels mix recorded events with fictionalised characters and crimes over a period of nine years. [In fact only three of the novels were dramatised; a friend who has read the quartet found the plot of the second, 1977, indecipherable]. The three stories in C4’s Red Riding offer a world of chaos, where crime and corruption are rife and where innocence is sacrificed. They do this by appropriating many of the techniques of modern US film and television noir. David Peace, in an online profile, listed Dante as a major influence. And Dante’s Inferno is a key reference in Se7en, another work singled out by Peace.

The films utilise dark gloomy lighting, dramatic and restless camera work, and muddy soundtracks, with dialogue that is frequently difficult to follow. And they rely on plotting which constructs a narrative labyrinth for the viewers, shot through with ambiguities, puzzles, teasers and unexplained events or motivations. There was one scriptwriter for all three films, Tony Grisoni, though each feature had a different director. A common narrative is maintained by the settings and by recurring characters who re-appear as the dramas move from one period to another. And most notably the narrative only offers an overall though tentative meaning at the conclusion of the third feature.

Red Riding adds another myth to that of the labyrinth and the monster: a fetish with swans. This motif appears to relate to another ancient myth, that of Leda and the Swan. Leda, whilst swimming in the river in the form of a swan, is seduced or raped by Zeus. This tale feeds into the myth of the swan maiden, found in a variety of forms. A hero sees a flock of swans, and finds they are really a group of beautiful women bathing. He steals one of the dresses on the shore, and that maiden is unable to fly away. The hunter marries her, but at some point his wife finds her original feathery dress and reverts to a swan and flies away.

                        The following contains plot SPOILERS.

In the Year of Our Lord 1974 opens the trilogy. The majority of the film appears to be an extended flashback by journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield). In full noir fashion the film opens with shots of a young girl with wings followed by that of Dunford holding a gun. The plot then fills in the events leading up to a shooting, though in an extremely fragmentary fashion. Eddie is following a story of child molestation and murder near Leeds. In the course of the film he becomes the lover of the mother, Paula (Rebecca Hall), of a missing young girl, Jeanette Garland. He meets property magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean). Paula lives on the Fitzwilliam Estate; Dawson has his own estate nearby. The settings are mainly south west of Leeds from Morley to Castleford, Wakefield and the above run-down estate near Pontefract. The latter becomes familiar, as do the six cooling towers visible en route from the road.

Dunford’s colleague and friend Barry Cannon (Anthony Flanagan) dies in a road accident. Eddie then he discovers that senior police are involved in corruption with Dawson and have ‘fitted up’ an innocent man for the child murders. One young girl found dead has been tortured and raped before murder. The torture includes sewing ’swan’s wings’ to her. It is this connection that finally leads Dunford to realise that Dawson is the monster whose ‘private weakness’ is child molestation. Dawson’s house is designed in a swan-like outline. Barry comments (rewriting Balzac); ‘behind every great house there lies a great crime!’ And we later discover one room contains a hanging swan, (evidence of the abuse).

The dialogue has frequent references to swans and wings, though the connection to the plot is not usually clear. Later features return to this as well as references to other animals. The film also provides frequently visual set-ups that suggest labyrinths, in tunnels, corridors and alleyways. Dunford is assaulted by police in a multi-story car park.  But the clearest parallel to a labyrinth is when Dunford is taking into custody after gate crashing Dawson’s reception. We find him in a blacked-out dungeon. When the lights go up it grim and damp: the basement below the Police HQ. The police torture Dunford, at one point introducing a line that will become familiar: “put your hands flat on the table.” And he is later dragged down a corridor into another dark room, a morgue in which lies the body of Paula. The trio of officer involved, Detective Superintendent Bill ‘Badger’ Molloy (Warren Clark), Sergeant Bob Craven (Sean Harris), and Police Constable Tommy Douglas (Tom Mooney) will re-appear in the subsequent dramas. In Red Riding it is these police who are the monsters. The complications of Paula’s death lead to the police stuffing a loaded gun in Dunford’s pocket and throwing him out a van with the words that re-appear again and again in the series: “This is the North, we do what we want!”  Dunford convinced that Dawson has killed Paula searches his house and see the swan. He then finds and shoots Dawson. After which, and the end of the flashback, he dies in a suicidal crash with a police car.

The second drama is set in The Year of Our Lord 1980. It is the height of the Yorkshire Ripper hunt, whose 12th or 13th victim has just been discovered. The opening credits features stills of the victims and newsreel footage from the time. The key protagonist is Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine); a senior officer from the Manchester Force charged with examining the long running and so far, failed Ripper enquiry. He brings with him two assistants, Chief Superintendent John Nolan (Tony Pitts), and Detective Sergeant Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake).

Whilst Hunter starts to examine the Ripper investigation it gradually becomes apparent that this is not the primary focus of the film. Hunter has been here before. Five years earlier he investigated the shooting at The Karachi Club in Wakefield. This turns out to be the incident when Eddie Dunford shot John Dawson. But that was followed by further shootings, including Craven and Douglas. The investigation is premised on robbery and murder by an unknown gang: Dunford’s death listed as a road accident. Hunter’s investigation remained unfinished: one complication being a short-lived affair with Helen. The events of the past still haunt him, and feature in dreams and flashbacks. They also start to turn up in the background of the Ripper investigation.

Hunter’s liaison officer in Leeds is the now promoted Superintendent Bob Craven. And the office of Hunter and his team appears to be in the same basement as that where Dunford was tortured. The passage to the office passes the pound of the barking police dogs: summoning up tones of the mythic beasts that guarded Hades. As in the first feature we have scenes frequently set in passages and on stairs, now interiors rather than the exteriors of the earlier drama. Hunter finally receives evidence that the Karachi Club shootings were carried out by a police led by ‘Badger’ Molloy. The evidence is provided by BJ (Robert Sheehan), who we saw in 1974 as a source for Dunford and his journalist friend, Barry. Hunter and BJ meet in what seems like a monster’s lair: a disused garage in Preston where BJ claims that the ‘13th’ victim of the Ripper died at the hands of Craven.

Hunter is already in trouble with the police establishment. He arranges to meet John Nolan in the basement office, and after Hunter has explained the new evidence Nolan tells him that Craven ‘is out of control’. We follow Hunter down a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells to a bare basement room, where lies Craven, bloody and shot. Nolan now executes the coup de grace on Hunter: backed up by his corrupt fellow policemen. The film ends, after footage of the captured Ripper, at the grave of Hunter in a Yorkshire cemetery.

Red Riding 3 opens with a flashback to 1974. At the wedding of Bill Molloy’s daughter a group of policemen gather for a tête-à-tête – there is Molloy, Maurice Jobson (David Morrisey), Bob Craven, Tommy Douglas, Dick Alderman (Shaun Dooley) and Jim Prentice (Chris Walker). In the background is Chief Constable Harold Angus, who clearly is implicated in the corruption. They are joined by John Dawson. Once again the audience hear the now familiar line, ” To the North, where we do what we want.” The scene explains the conspiracy that lay behind events in the 1974.

The Year of Our Lord 1983 also returns to the central plot of 1974, missing children. We see stills of a young girl, Hazel Atkins, missing from the Morley area. As with the earlier case, that of Clare Kemplay, the investigation is lead by Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson [promoted from Detective Superintendent], assisted by Detective Inspector Alderman. Jobson receives help from a medium, Mandy Wymer (Saskia Reeves). With nice irony, at one point she instructs him and Alderman to ‘put your hands on the table’. Later she leads him to remains that may be those of Jeanette Garland.

 Jobson’s central role is shared with another character from earlier features, BJ. And a new protagonist, solicitor John Piggott (Mark Addy), joins them. Jobson is haunted by memories of the earlier investigations and we see frequent flashbacks to that time. BJ also has memories of that period, as a victim. Piggott becomes involved at the request of the mother of Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays), wrongly imprisoned for the earlier crimes. But Piggott also has memories from the past. Various characters at different times, including Myshkin, claim ‘you know, everybody knows!’ 

The style of the film is familiar, with a dark and drear mise en scène, disconcerting close-ups and jump cuts, and characters framed by doors, walls and passageways. We revisit haunted locations like the gypsy encampment, the run-down Fitzwilliam Estate and the disused garage in Preston. In the latter BJ unearths a shotgun: presumably a relic from the Karachi Club shooting. One flashback shows Molloy and Jobson interrogating Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), a minister seen in both 1974 and 1980. Once more a prisoner was told to ‘put your hands on the table’. However, Laws, whose white van was seen near the crime scenes, was given an alibi by John Dawson. It is clear that Molloy and Jobson realised that Laws and Dawson were probably guilty of the child murders. But the police corruption meant that Myshkin was ‘fitted up’ for the crimes. An enigmatic exchange between several policemen makes sense when related to the plot of the 1974: they set up Dunford to dispose of Dawson without wrecking their financial interests. The subsequent shootings were either punishments or covering up evidence: or both.

All three central characters of 1983 are caught in the past and guilt. Jobson broods over the corruption and cover-ups. His increasingly awkward questions and investigation lead to enforced early retirement. Piggott was bought up on the Fitzwilliam Estate, and his father was an ex-policeman. The father was also a member of a paedophile circle involving Laws and Dawson. A flashback offers glimpse of the abuse with the words, ‘Piggott is king today, be nice to Mr. Piggott.’ This is John Piggott’s flashback: hence his guilt. And BJ also has flashbacks with glimpses of abuse as he returns to avenge the past wrongs. The climax of the third film comes on The Fitzwilliam Estate: crosscutting between number 7, Law’s house, and an allotment on open ground above the estate.

BJ arrives at the house with his shotgun. Her confronts Laws but is unable to pull the trigger. As Laws prepares to mutilate or kill BJ Jobson shoots him: with another shotgun. [Also from the Karachi Club shooting?]. Meanwhile Piggott is investigating the allotment. He enters what appears to be a disused pigeon cote, full of feathers. Laws discovers Piggott and knock him down into the passage below the cote: returning to his house, [and death]. When Piggott awakens he explores the dark, subterranean labyrinth. And at the end of this Piggott find the missing girl, Hazel. As he emerges from the cellar to the waiting Jobson, shafts of light pierce the gloom, amid a ‘confetti’ of feathers. The writer, Tony Grisoni explained: “we might save one of the children. I just couldn’t have them all die. I wanted to be released from hell by the end.” (Interview in Sight & Sound, March 2009).

And indeed Piggott does carry Hazel off home on his shoulder. BJ also survives, and 1983 ends on him, ‘the one that got away’. However, as is frequently the case with film noir and serial killer films, the ending is hardly optimistic. In each of the three features a monster is slain: Dawson by Dunford: Craven by his colleagues: and Laws by Jobson. But the central monster, the focus of all the corruption and violence; whose victims outnumber the innocents saved; the Red Riding police mafia survive or at least go unpunished. Molloy and Jobson have both retired, but others remain, including the Chief Constable Angus. This would also seem to be in keeping with the original myth: for whilst Theseus kills the Minotaur, Minos, who was ultimately responsible, survived: though he came to a nasty end later. One sub-text of Red Riding would appear to be that the Police have acquired the prerogatives of ancient royalty, both the power and the invulnerability.

Notes: Revolution Films produced the three Red Riding films for Channel 4. It seems Channel is releasing the films abroad on 35mm. I believe there was one screening of the films in 35mm in Leeds.

A discussion of other serial killer films is to be found in Into the Labyrinth in the ITP Film Reader, 1996.

Red Riding: themes and characters

Maxine Peake as DS Helen Marshall – one of only two women in the series to have a professional job, but even so her main function is to make a man vulnerable.

Following last Saturday’s event in which I discussed the Red Riding Trilogy alongside The Damned United as adaptations of the novels of David Peace, I’ve learned a few things from colleagues.

I always stress to students that some of the most useful analyses of films and and other media texts start with stating the obvious and then trying to work out its significance. The obvious point to make about these five novels that became four films is that each of them has a central male character (actually two characters in 1977 and 1983). There is no corresponding female character in any of the stories. All the female characters are wives in the backgrounds, lovers/casual partners of the central character, prostitutes or other women who are the victims of male violence. Even the two women who do actually work for a living other than selling their bodies are both defined more by their relationship with the male protagonist than by their professional work.

The majority of the characters in the stories are racist and misogynistic in their use of language. West Yorkshire is a place of almost unremitting gloom in a moral sense (and often in terms of the weather!). In three of the films, the main protagonist arrives in the county by road, peering through the driving rain. David Peace is a Yorkshire novelist, but he seems to have adopted that well-known Lancashire saying, “the only good thing that comes out of Yorkshire is the road to Lancashire”.

So, going into the hell that was West Yorkshire from 1974 to 1983, the male protagonist, a vulnerable and corrupted man, compromised often by his relationships with women, finds enough vestiges of decency or moral fibre to redeem himself in some way and to help to make the world a marginally better place. All these men seem to me to be lower middle-class, grammar school boys in the days before mass university entrance. They have jobs that are not (yet) affected by the industrial decline beginning to take place in the region. They are policemen, journalists, a solicitor, a football manager. Their strengths and weaknesses are associated with sex, violence, alcohol and football – a stereotypical mix of the qualities of masculinity in the North of England. And for these men to succeed, many women have to be sacrificed. (I’m not suggesting that Brian Clough was a violent or promiscuous man, in Peace’s fictionalised version he uses violent language and alcohol to counter his despair about the potential waste of his football talent.)

My conclusion from this ‘obvious’ observation is that David Peace is more likely to have fans who are young and male and attracted by the the ‘hardness’ of the writing. However, my event attracted an audience with a fairly equal proportion of men and women and the person who had the most experience of Peace’s writing was a young woman. I’m not sure what I make of this. I find the books very hard going partly because of the sheer brutality and misogyny of the language, but I realise that I shouldn’t assume that this will necessarily deter female readers.

One aspect of this that I do find interesting, however, is that the two male characters who have to themselves be sacrificed in their attempt to uncover the truth are the two who are in some ways more ‘feminised’/less brutal in their behaviour and who return to Yorkshire from ‘outside’, ‘tainted’ by their experience of living in the South or, nearly as bad, in Lancashire. For some cinema/TV fans, the actor Paddy Considine has been something of a hero figure after his roles in two Shane Meadows films, A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and also in Last Resort (1999) and My Summer of Love (2004) for Pawel Pawlikowski. In all these films, Considine is at times charming but then disturbing and sometimes violent. I think this led to expectations about his role in Red Riding 1980 in which he plays an Assistant Chief Constable from Lancashire who is recruited by the Home Office and the Police Inspectorate to find out what has been happening in the West Yorkshire force. Once over the shock of Considine as a senior police officer (aged 40 in the book – Considine was born in 1974) I thought he played the role very well, but there have been complaints that he was miscast, since he doesn’t act the ‘hard man’ and is instead emotionally ‘weak’. In fact he’s probably the least corrupt and most honest of all of Peace’s male protagonists, despite his infidelity. In a starry cast across the mini-series, Considine is perhaps the best known actor for an international audience.

For whatever reason, 1980 had the lowest audience figures on Channel 4 out of the three films (1.9 million, compared to 2.03 million for 1983 and 3.00 million for 1974). Personally, I thought James Marsh’s film was the most coherent and most focused of the three films and the most consistent in style. In the range of responses that I have seen it is often named as the best or the worst.

Several other ideas came up in our discussion. I introduced the concept of ‘British noir‘ by screening the opening to Get Carter (1971) in which Michael Caine travels North to Newcastle from London to attend his brother’s funeral. We then used our discussion of this well-known film in relation to the opening of Red Riding 1974. I confess that I hadn’t chosen Get Carter for any other reason than it was ‘to hand’ and it represented an interesting attempt to make a noirish crime film in the early 1970s. However, one of the audience pointed out that 1974 has a very similar opening – a young man returns to West Yorkshire from the South in order to attend his father’s funeral and to start work as a crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post. Like Michael Caine/Jack Carter he is dressed in more modern clothes and has developed a sophisticated swagger which makes him stand out in the newsroom, the press club bar and the family funeral. We also noted that the same cooling towers, often visible in Red Riding, were passed by Jack Carter’s train going North.

One of the reasons for showing Get Carter was also to make the point that it is now very difficult to recreate the landscape of the 1970s in the cities of the North of England. The docks and the cranes and often the vista of back-to-back houses has gone from Newcastle and Liverpool and Salford, along with the mills, the mines and the manufacturing plants and the Victorian town centre buildings. Control was a good example of a British film set in the 1970s that was unable to use ‘authentic’ locations, because they simply aren’t there any more. How much is this a factor in Red Riding’s locations and its stylised, expressionistic camerawork and production design? I’m not sure, because in the three novels used Peace restricts himself to fairly generic locations/buildings in the area around Wakefield and the Leeds scenes can be kept inside the Post building, a police station etc. However, the restriction to interiors and fairly anonymous locations allows the expressionist presentation to create an overall sense of the ‘hell’ that is West Yorkshire. Locations in The Damned United are more problematic since Elland Road and the Baseball Ground, the homes in 1974 of Leeds United and Derby County, have been re-built and demolished respectively. Again the number of locations is restricted. Budgetary considerations also mean that Scarborough stands in for Brighton and Saddleworth for wherever the Cloughs had their house in the 1970s (I’m assuming Derby/Notts). (The novel of 1977 would also have caused problems since it has scenes in Bradford and Manchester.)

Overall, Peace creates a world of his own imagination that he presents as West Yorkshire in the 1970s. Although his novels are pitted with news events and appropriate pop songs on the radio, there is no attempt to represent the ‘real’ West Yorkshire of the period – in which as some local residents have pointed out, journalists and others were still dependent on buses rather than driving their own cars. This isn’t the ‘authenticity’ of costume drama, but it may in some way represent how people felt during the dreadful years of the Ripper and violence on the football terraces.

Red Riding – Introduction

Sean Bean as property developer John Dawson in Red Riding.

The TV ‘event’ of the year so far in the UK was arguably the broadcast by Channel 4 of the Red Riding mini-series, or perhaps the three-part ’special’, in March. The media community of critics and industry commentators fell on these three films (around 100 minutes each) as the first evidence for several years that UK TV could match the ‘quality’ offerings of HBO and other American producers. The argument has been made that HBO could not exist in the UK as the subscription TV audience (for drama) is not large enough to merit sustained production of filmed series. Both Channel 4 and the BBC, the two publicly-owned channels have found themselves needing to find co-production partners in Canada, the US or Europe in order to fund major series.

Red Riding is a three film adaptation of four novels by David Peace, one of Granta magazine’s ‘Young British Novelists’ in 2003. Peace was 32 when his first novel was published in 1999 and 35 when the quartet was completed in 2002. Since then he has completed other novels such as The Damned United (2006). The three films are essentially ‘cinematic’, all directed by UK film directors (two in ‘Scope) and co-produced by Film 4 with Revolution Films (the company owned by producer Andrew Eaton and prolific British director Michael Winterbottom) and LipSync Productions with support from the Regional Screen Agency, Screen Yorkshire.

There seem to be mixed messages about the technical production credits, but it seems like the first two films were shot on 16mm (Super 16?) and the third using the Red One digital camera. All three were printed to 35mm for possible cinema releases outside the UK. All three have been screened in at least one cinema in Leeds (West Yorkshire being the location for the stories) and there are indications that the films will be released in the US and other territories. For those who can’t wait, the UK Region 2 DVD box for the trilogy has already been released.

So why all the fuss? First the Film 4/Revolution Films tie-up means that this was always going to be innovative/challenging etc. The three directors, Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker are all front-rank, experienced directors with Marsh of Man on Wire fame, being one of the most celebrated UK directors of recent years. Then there is the cast, one of the finest ever assembled for a UK production. Northern talent dominates UK drama production and half of it is on show here with Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Warren Clarke, Mark Addy, Maxine Peake, Jim Carter, Sean Bean plus Peter Mullan, Rebecca Hall, Eddie Marsan, Sean Harris, Andrew Garfield etc. from points South and further North. 

The novels were adapted by Tony Grisoni, who previously worked with Eaton and Winterbottom on In This World (2002), one of the great and unjustly neglected British films of recent years. He has also written for US independents such as Terry Gilliam on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland. Grisoni’s solution to the problem of budget restrictions (which meant three films rather than four) was to cut out the second book (1977) focusing on the infamous ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ investigation and to rework the other three, moving some events from one book story to another. The films carry the book titles, 1974, 1980 and 1983, but the final film includes elements of the first story in flashbacks – the whole thing is very confusing and reading the books simply adds more detail without necessarily explaining everything. Overall, Grisoni remained ‘faithful’ to the tone of the novels, whilst changing characters and story structures. As for the actual budget of the three films, I haven’t yet found it, but I think the cost was £2 million per film. This doesn’t sound much, but it’s about average for a 100/120 minute filmed TV drama and actually slightly more than the median budget for a UK feature film for theatrical release (where budgets have dropped alarmingly – or perhaps it’s a good thing?).

What’s it all about? That’s easy – it’s corrupt police power, brutality against prostitutes, criminal business dealings, naive journalists etc. David Peace is often described as a disciple of James Ellroy. It’s ‘Yorkshire noir‘ with Peace drawing on his childhood memories of the Ripper investigations and the sheer brutality of his home territory on the outskirts of Wakefield. He also draws on the literature of the area’s most famous literary figures, the 1960s writers Stan Barstow and David Storey.

For those outside the UK, it’s worth explaining the title. A ‘riding’ is old Norse for a ‘thirding’ – the Viking invaders dividing up the land into three. These became the North, East and West Ridings (there never was a South Riding, though this was used as a fictional district by the novelist Winifred Holtby). In 1974, local government in England was revised and the ridings disappeared. The largest and most populous, the ‘West Riding’, was split in two and two new ‘metropolitan counties’ (i.e. primarily urban areas) were created, known as South Yorkshire (Sheffield/Rotherham/Doncaster/Barnsley) and West Yorkshire (Bradford/Leeds/Wakefield/Huddersfield/Halifax). The Red Riding Trilogy is based in the new West Yorkshire of 1974 – when the police force was also a new separate authority. I confess that when I first heard the title, I leapt to the conclusion that it referred to the political hue of the region, i.e. ‘red’ socialism. But, it was Sheffield in South Yorkshire that was known in the 1970s as the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’. Not that politics weren’t important in West Yorkshire, but Red Riding has other meanings and in the novels much is made of characters known as ‘the wolf’, ‘the owl’, ‘the badger’ and ‘the rat’, not to mention the swans. This suggests that we are in the territory of a very macabre fairy story about Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad wolf.

So far, I’ve read one and a half of the novels and watched the TV series. I’ll report back when I’ve discussed the series at a public event coming up soon.

Henning Mankell and Kurt Wallander

Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander in the BBC series shot in Sweden.

It’s been interesting to monitor the coverage of BBC1’s new three-part season of television films featuring Kenneth Branagh as Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Police on the Southern coast of Sweden.

I started reading the Kurt Wallander books when the first English translations appeared in paperback four or five years ago. I was immediately hooked and read several more of Mankell’s novels, including both the Wallander series and others. Mankell is an old-fashioned Swedish socialist and all-round good guy with a commitment to his work in Mozambique where he runs a community theatre in Maputo. His police procedurals featuring Wallander carry some of the author’s concerns into a critique of Swedish society. I like this, but what’s most important is that Wallander is at once both the typical beat-up and dysfunctional ex-husband and son/father and a professional who makes honest, human mistakes, but sticks around to see the job through. The books are long and there is a lot of ‘procedure’ which perversely I enjoy as much if not more than the bursts of action. I guess I idly wondered how the books would work on film or television and now I have a chance to find out.

Wallander is a joint BBC Scotland/Yellow Bird (Zodiak Sweden) production with Branagh’s own company and the impetus seems to have come from Branagh himself. According to the BBC Press Release, Yellow Bird have already made 13 Wallander films in Sweden (I didn’t think there were that many novels and in fact several of these films are based on roughly outlined ideas by Mankell – see below).

In conjunction with this, BBC4 has screened a 1 hour documentary on Mankell and Wallander, fronted by John Harvey, one of Britain’s best crime writers who created his own similar character – Charlie Resnick, a Nottingham-based copper who featured in a noirish BBC series in the early 1990s. Here’s a link to John Harvey’s website. He’s just as remarkable a character as Mankell, with a background as an English teacher, a film lecturer, a poet and jazzman and producer of 90 novels – a pulp fiction writer and now a major crime novelist. The BBC couldn’t have found a better interviewer of Mankell. I learned things I might have guessed, but didn’t know. Mankell is enormous in Germany and the Scandinavians clearly like their crime fiction as much as the Germans and the Brits. Once on television, the crime series is as likely to develop a fan culture as much as the books. (According to the BBC4 documentary, Mankell has sold 25 million novels and in Germany outsells J.K. Rowling.)

The documentary was followed by two of the Swedish films, which I intend to compare with Branagh’s version. But first, a few preliminary remarks about the the BBC Wallander. It’s a classy production, shot in Sweden but with a UK cast. It’s lensed by Anthony Dod Mantle (hero figure on films by Danny Boyle and various Dogme projects) using a digital RED camera (source: Wikipedia which has quite a detailed entry). The series has a big budget. £7.5 million for three 90 minutes single films is way above the current average for a ‘domestic’ British feature film. Budgets in the film industry have fallen so much that most cinema films in the UK cost less than £2 million. So, the series should look good, especially if the RED camera allows more of the budget to go on effects and location dressing etc.

So far, I’ve watched 2 and a half of the three films. I’ve enjoyed them all, but then I think Mankell’s material is potentially so attractive that it would be difficult for a highly competent crew to mess up – and I don’t think they do. Overall, the films are, I think more successful than most of the British TV crime series of the last twenty years (that I’ve watched). My own benchmark would be Dalziel and Pascoe – at least in the early series. Kenneth Branagh is very good. I used to avoid Branagh when he seemed to be everywhere doing everything, but now I appreciate him a lot more. However . . . he isn’t my idea of Kurt Wallander. This is just a matter of the old literary adaptation syndrome. We all paint mental pictures of what our literary heroes look like and Branagh doesn’t look like the Swedish cop I imagined (there is no reason to think that my imagination is better than the adapters – just different). Mankell himself is full of praise for Branagh and the series – but then Mankell is intimately involved with Yellow Bird as a production company (see the comprehensive English language Swedish website for Mankell’s novels). Wallander’s younger sidekick Martinsson is played by Tom Hiddleston, who I saw a few weeks ago in a film I really disliked called Unrelated. I’m sure I’ve seen some of the other actors as well on UK TV. I find this distracting. There are other decisions about the production that derive from the adaptation. There are dummy editions of the local paper – in Swedish which seems a little strange. I’m trying to think of the conventions in earlier series. I remember the two UK TV versions of Maigret (in the 1960s with Rupert Davies and in the 1990s with Michael Gambon) and there was also a Thames series of Van der Valk with Barry Foster as a Dutch detective in the 1970s. I can’t remember whether any of these were so concerned with the authenticity of props (which do fit awkwardly with characters speaking English)

Linda Wallander (Johanna Sällström) and Stefan Lindman (Ola Rapace) in Before the Frost

The two Swedish films that were screened were from a series of 13 produced by Yellow Bird. Before the Frost (2005) was released in cinemas, as was the second film Mastermind (2006) but the rest of the series went straight to DVD/broadcast as far as I can tell. Before the Frost is an adaptation of a Mankell novel in which Wallander’s daughter Linda returns to Ystad having successfully graduated police training. The difficult relationship between father and daughter is now further complicated by having them work together on a case in which Linda herself is implicated. By contrast, Mastermind is, like the other 11 films, based on an original outline by Mankell developed into a script by a team of young writers. Variety’s Swedish reviewer doesn’t think much of Before the Frost and is particularly critical of Krister Henriksson as Kurt Wallander, comparing him unfavourably to an earlier Swedish casting (which I haven’t seen). I can understand the objections and perhaps the actor isn’t authoritative enough – but he still seemed closer to Wallander than Branagh. The clincher for me was the performance of Johanna Sällström as Linda. Sällström was a star of Swedish TV/film/theatre before the series and I found her both convincing as Linda and a strong performer as a major character in the narrative. She managed to be at once both attractive and charismatic, but also vulnerable and ‘human’ in her emotions. The rest of the casting of the Swedish films certainly worked for me in that the characters in the police team all looked much more like ‘ordinary people’ than well-known actors. What I mean is that there were people who were overweight and balding (i.e. ‘normal’). The office manager in the police station was much more prominent in Mastermind (mainly because the plot sees the police under threat from a criminal with access to the police station).

Ebba (Marianne Mörck) the office manager in the Swedish series.

Kurt Wallander (Krister Henriksson) and Linda (Johanna Sällström) at the beginning of Before the Frost when Linda has just graduated from the police college.

The interesting aspect of Mastermind was that it began in much the same way as other Wallander stories, but by the end had become less a procedural and much more of a thriller. I found it brutal and terrifying to watch and it seemed very well paced. It was only afterwards that I realised that the plot had several holes and that I’d been led through it much as in the Hollywood movies I tend not to watch these days. I enjoyed the nods at Hitchcock’s Rear Window and I was intrigued by the focus on the father-daughter relationship – central to the narrative here but always present to some extent when Kurt and Linda are working together. Here is a thesis for someone. The middle aged police inspector and his rebellious, disrespectful, feisty daughter/daughter surrogate are central to the Wallander and Rebus stories and also to those of the Icelandic Inspector Erlendur in Jar City and the other novels by Arnaldur Indridason.

Reception

Thanks to the wonders of i-Play, I’ve been able to re-watch the BBC2 Late Review team discussing Wallander and Richard Coles (once of The Communards and now a cleric and Radio 4 presenter) made the most interesting points. He referred to the general view that Mankell’s novels are an hommage to the ‘lost social democracy’ of the Sweden of the 1970s/80s. Thus the crimes and criminals that Wallander investigates are often corrupt politicians and business people – often influenced by American ideas – or fascists of one stripe or another. (In other novels he has explored the pro-Nazi fascists who lurk in the darker corners of Swedish life.) As Coles remarks, this casts attention on the younger generation (like Linda) who have grown up under the impact of the disintegrating consensus for social democracy and this explanation of the distance between Kurt and Linda is interesting. What he didn’t say directly, but which is a strong element of the novels, is that many of Mankell’s novels have narratives which see characters travelling abroad or arriving in Sweden as migrants – the loss of consensus is related to the globalisation of Sweden. This creates tension for the international socialist that I assume Mankell to be.

Apart from Branagh’s performance, the other issue that has interested UK critics has been the representation of the Swedish landscape via the specific lighting camerawork. It is certainly the case that the UK series with more money to spend is probably more ambitious in its attempts to present the distinctive landscapes of Southern Sweden with ‘rolling’ countryside comprising fields of grain or grassland leading down to the sea and occasional dense woodland all revealed in midsummer sunshine and long, bright evenings. (I was struck by the similarity of some shots of cars travelling through the landscape and similar scenes in Danish films such as Festen.) The Swedish series (which I watched on a lower definition image) seemed more conventional in its use of lighting and filters.

On the BBC web forum it was certainly the case that enthusiastic viewers were mainly like me in preferring the Swedish series. I hope that BBC4 are going to do more screenings of European crime TV (are there any Japanese or Latin American series they could buy in?). I did catch the Salvo Montalbano films broadcast around the same time and perhaps I’ll blog on those at some future date.