David J Black

Soppy romantic books and films of the Jackie variety are not for your scrivener, the reader may have gathered, yet one isn’t unsentimental. A dear aunt about 10 years older than oneself decided, in her mid-teens that hanging out with boys was much more fun than sitting at home reading soppy books, so she passed her library on to me. As a result my knowledge of the pony club and the chalet school was pretty well unrivalled among my pre-pubescent male chums. I was thrilled by Pamela Hansford Johnson’s balletic The Swish of the Curtain and developed a mild, if abiding, passion for Jo March in Little Women. Biggles, by contrast, was a dull and shallow blaggard, though I would eventually be pulled back into line thanks to Flashman, Sherlock Holmes, and the irascible Lieutenant Colonel Richard Sharpe of the 33rd Regiment of Foot – but that’s another story.

Reviews of One Day – the film which long preceded the Netflix series – were mostly cloying and fawning, though The Observer’s Philip French observed that Anne Hathaway’s casting “borders on the disastrous”, while her accent was “all over the map”. Betsey Sharkey of the L.A. Times panned it as ‘”a heartbreaking disappointment of a film” while for Peter Howell of the Toronto Star just waiting for it to end was something of a near-death experience.

The best review of all for your scrivener’s money, however, was from no-nonsense New Yorker Kristy Puchko, whose 2018 Film Stage review was headlined “Why One Day is the Most Toxic Film of the year”. She was nothing if not witheringly honest. “I don’t come here to review One Day. I come here to eviscerate it.” When Dexter descends into media coke-head uselessness while Emma becomes a successful novelist their relationship, according to Ms Puchko (who had by now firmly replaced Jo March in this writer’s literary affections) was like “Beauty and the Sex Offender”.

That such effluvial mush ever gets released is irritating. That such films become box office hits is truly distressing. One Day banked $59 million against a $15 million budget, the Netflix series went stratospheric, and the BBC booked Mr Nicholl’s next novel as a radio mini-series. At least it wasn’t subsidised by the Scottish taxpayer, as T2 Trainspotting was, thanks to a $750,000 no strings gift from the Scottish government’s arts agency to Tristar Pictures Inc of Burbank California, a subdivision of global conglomerate the Sony Corporation, the net result being a drug-raddled film which cruelly mocked deprived kids on Scottish sink housing estates. 

Bill Douglas

By contrast the greatest Scottish film never made would end up as little more than a magnificent screenplay based on an 1824 psychological thriller, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The man behind the idea was Bill Douglas. Those who knew him would not have hesitated to describe him as a genius. I had first come across Bill as a teenager when, Pasolini style, he’d roamed around our run-down Edinburgh council estate to recruit local people as participants in his planned film, My Childhood. As one of several scallywags I’d appear in a bonfire scene, while my aunt, a local housewife and social activist, was a schoolteacher taking her class through the paces of All Things Bright and Beautiful which, in the film maker’s early years, they most certainly weren’t. 

Bill Douglas’s Bergmanesque biopic was the first in a trilogy that would go on to sweep up prizes at film festivals around the world, starting with a Venice Silver Lion. He had his doubters in Britain, the influential film critic Barry Norman among them, but his international reputation was soon soaring. His early education was rudimentary, at best, yet he was a voracious reader and an intellectually astute observer, with a library of books in his flat in London’s Archer Street which occupied every inch of wall space up to the ceiling. 

Bill Douglas’s conversations would range from Blake, Chekhov, and Swift to his New York friend ‘Bob’ (Robert de Niro), but he was never flippant in my experience, though always possessed of a droll sense of humour. He would only make one other film before his early death at the age of 57, Comrades, based on the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and he always struggled to raise funding for his projects, stark depictions of grinding poverty and issues of social justice being low in the pecking order for the British film industry at that time.  

Your scrivener had some practical input into Bill’s last – and in some ways most ambitious – project, which, tragically, never came to fruition. He had ambitions for his screenplay of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and he contacted me through my aunt (the My Childhood schoolteacher) who thought I might be able to help with locations.

This was a case of extraordinary synchronicity, for I had not long before sold my flat in Edinburgh to buy a derelict old house in the Scottish Borders. Bill and his producer, Andrew Noble, came for lunch and were instantly persuaded that it was a perfect location. They were particularly taken with the bleached skeleton of a long-dead elm tree in the overgrown garden. On no account, I was informed, should it be felled. We spent the best part of a day walking around, taking photographs, consulting parts of the film script, and enthusing. 

Unfortunately Justified Sinner was still at its preliminary development stage, though I was informed that Sean Connery had agreed to play the role of Lord Dalcastle. This, they felt sure, would bring the money rolling in. Bill Douglas, by that time, was already ill with the cancer which would kill him, and although others, including the author Ian Rankin, would later revive the idea of making the film, it would continue to be the greatest Scottish film never made, at least in your scrivener’s view.

So much for the best Scottish film never made. By contrast, it was a case of One Day after another when Netflix decided to stream a 14-part variation of the 2015 film. It was updated with a diversity angle, Anne Hathaway’s role being played by Ambika Mod as the half lapsed-Catholic and half Hindu object of the irritating Dexter’s desire. Ms Mod, who has a good screen presence, might yet prove to be an accomplished actress, if she can avoid saccharine pulp like this. 

In any event the Netflix series is receiving even more salivatory reviews than its movie predecessor. Rotten Tomatoes crowned the “swooningly romantic” love epic with an enviable rating of 90 per cent +. Thank God for one voice of sanity, however. Camilla Long of my old paper The Sunday Times, damned it as “absolutely, incorrigibly, resolutely awful. I don’t mean comically awful, I mean literally the end of culture.” With that acerbic, but accurate, comment, Ms Long more than earns a place in this writer’s pantheon of heroine critics, along with Kristy Puchko and Jo March.

Ms Long knew what she was up against, however. The PR steamroller had done its worst, and the tame reviewers had lined up to smother it with plaudits. Even The Spectator’s James Delingpole, a man who doesn’t tolerate much in life, felt it was “like indulging in a too-delicious box of chocolates” while the normally grounded Hugo Rifkind of The Times purred “It’s all perfect – you’ll love this to bits.” Others gushed effusively: “The idea is brilliant and everything about this production is magic” – “a beautiful and exceptional pairing” – “pure chemistry – pure magnetism”  – “timeless and totally captivating” – “boundlessly joyous and heartfelt” and so on, ad nauseam.

Journalists, like other human beings, are susceptible to the madness of crowds syndrome, and often worry about stepping out of line, even where the line is to big-up streamed schlock. In breaking with the tribal orthodoxy, Ms Long was aware that she was taking a risk. “The Netflix hit is so popular that to criticise it would be like killing a kitten. Which is why you’re lucky to have me – One Day is a helpless fantasy that’s outrageous, empty and absolutely awful.”

The other side of this tawdry counterfeit coin is a cultural tragedy of epic proportions. A home grown British director of the calibre of Bill Douglas, whose brilliance has been rated alongside that of Truffaut, Bergmann, Tarkovsky, Wenders, Kubrick and Pasolini, was shunned and ignored in his own country, to this nation’s everlasting shame. As the Scottish film director Lynne Ramsay has said “If he’d been French, he’d have made at least twenty films.”

The One Day red-plaque idea would appear to have been cooked up by Netflix and a local Edinburgh architectural firm of unreconstructed modernists. Weep, ye children of Edina, weep.

The Jackie readers, it would seem, have won.