Trollheart

As we all rush through our Christmas preparations, picking up the turkey and ham, checking off the gift list (better not leave out Uncle Seamus: not going through THAT embarrassment again this year!) and queuing in the cold and rain for hours and hours outside that one shop that promised --- faithfully --- it had just a small number of PS4s in stock, let’s not forget what Christmas is really about: the birth of Santa Claus.

Seriously, once in a while it’s nice to just take a step back from all the secular madness that surrounds, informs and often overwhelms the holiday season and just go all spiritual for a bit. Well, it IS a religious holiday at its heart, isn’t it? What do you mean, you didn’t know that?

Well, while nobody would ever accuse me of being the most religious person, I do like the story of Jesus and love to see movies about it. Christian fundamentalists would have us all believe that God created everything, and that may be true. If so, then he also created movies. But in another strange, kind of roundabout way, movies could be said to have created God, at least for the big or small screen. As far back as 1905 they were making silent movies about Our Lord, and of course with the advent of colour, 70mm film and things like Cinemascope and Technicolour, it was only natural that the sixties would see some of the biggest, baddest and most over-the-top movies about Jesus ever made.

That’s what this section is all about then: deciding which is the better. I had originally intended this to be a three-way fight, but the third contestant, 1953’s “The Robe”, turns out not to be about Jesus at all. He’s in it, but only peripherally, and really it would be unfair to put such a movie up against the other two, so we’re down to a proper head-to-head, a real slamdown and a fight for the title of the Classic Christ Movie.

In the blue corner, weighing in at 260 minutes and with a budget of approximately 21 million US Dollars, we have

Originally a four-hour-plus epic, drastically cut back in later releases and eventually shortened to 2 hours 17 minutes, “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (you’ve got to capitalise the lot, don’t you really?) was based on a novel by Fulton Ouster, itself based on a radio play that ran in the US in 1947 episodically. George Stevens was the man who intended to bring it to the big screen, but it was a slow process. The screenplay took over two years to write alone, and by 1961, four years before its release date, costs had already spiralled to a staggering 2.3 million US Dollars, which even back then was a boatload of money, considering not one scene had yet been shot! So concerned were they with the rising costs involved in making the movie --- or more correctly, preparing to make it --- that backers Twentieth Century Fox dropped the project, and Stevens had to be saved by United Artists, who eventually released the picture.

Like most of the movies about the life of Jesus, this sticks fairly closely to the “facts”, as they were, which is to say, the version described in the Bible. It’s almost a direct telling of the story from that revered tome, and doesn’t deviate much if at all from the accepted version. Interestingly though, it was a general unknown who was offered the top role, indeed the very man who played Antonius Block, the knight in recently-reviewed Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”, Max von Sydow, and for my money he did a good job. Apparently Stevens wanted someone not already linked with any role or character, someone US audiences would not know. I must say though, Charlton Heston in the role of John the Baptist comes close to stealing the show, and that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re up against the Son of God!

The version I watched clocked in at just under three hours and twenty minutes, and even at that reduced time from the original it seemed long, slow and boring in many places. Definitely a case of being overstretched. I shudder to think what the full version was like! The film also suffers from a “me too!” syndrome, with film stars all wanting a bit part, some of which make no sense. The most famous and well-known of these is of course the sudden appearance out of nowhere by John Wayne, who drawls “Truly this man was the son of God!” in his characteristic, laconic and almost bored manner, but Martin Landau fails to shine as Caiphas, Roddy McDowell as Matthew is almost anonymous and David McCallum is completely wasted in the role of Judas, a one-dimensional, flat and uninspiring character compared to the one played in the other movie. Others of note include Pat Boone, Shelley Winters, Angela Lansbury and Sidney Poitier, though what any of them are doing in the movie is anyone’s guess. Even Star Trek’s Sarek, the late Mark Lenard, gets a look in!

The music is of course stunning and evocative, as you would expect, and Alfred Newman’s score was one of five Academy Awards the film was nominated for. Whether it won any of them I don’t know. The sets are also very impressive, though I do wonder about Stevens’ insistence on shooting the whole thing in America? Sounds a little like trying to prove God was born in Queens to me! Mind you, our other movie didn’t head to the Holy Land either, but with a budget of twenty-one mill you would have thought they would have, literally, gone the extra mile. Or few thousand miles, I guess. Nonetheless, I have to admit that when they show the scene ostensibly taking place in the desert where Jesus faces forty days and nights of temptation and fasting, I would never have guessed it was Death Valley, and similarly, the sermon on the Mount actually takes place in Utah, so it’s not like it’s obvious, but still, you do feel a little bit cheated that they’re not actually walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Unless he ever visited California, which I find unlikely….

All quibbles aside though, and remembering that the movie never grossed even its freakishly huge budget, and so was seen as a flop and an expensive failure, I did enjoy “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, with certain reservations, which I will detail later on in this article when I compare the two movies and put them up against each other. But what about its classic opponent?

Well, in the red corner, ladies and gentlemen, will you please give it up for


Not to be confused with the earlier movie of almost the same name from the twenties, which just added the definite article to its title, this was the other “blockbuster bible movie” of the day, and the two are in many ways very similar, and in other ways poles apart. Interestingly, while George Stevens was flying to Rome to consult the Pope on the making of his movie, this one slipped in under the radar and got released four years before his made the big screen, which must have been annoying for the great filmmaker, as this would have been the first “real” movie about Christ since 1935’s “Golgotha”, unless you count “Ben Hur”, which I don’t, or indeed “The Robe”, which I also don’t, as neither focus on the actual figure of Christ and he is basically incidental, although instrumental, to the storyline. But poor old Stevens: that’s what you get for farting around with 352 oil paintings as your storyboard and retaking every scene a zillion times: someone else beats you to it!

Starring Jeffrey “I could have been Kirk” Hunter in the top role, it’s something of a different take on the story, though again it sticks very closely to the writings of Scripture. “King of kings” details the birth of Christ, the journey to Bethlehem and the exile to Egypt, whereas this is brushed over in “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, which is odd, considering the latter is the longer picture by about an hour and would have easily been able to accomodate such a surely integral and important part of the plot, as it were? But like its rival, “King of kings” mainly concentrates on Jesus’s life from age thirty or so, from the time he begins to preach, gathering his disciples to him and generally getting up the noses of the Romans. That’s not surprising, as really, up to that point there’s little in the Bible about Jesus the man, leading to speculation on what exactly he did for those twenty-odd years between childhood and manhood, but that’s another story. Any film or series focussing on Jesus will always be firmly set in this short period of his life.

There are, as I said, things I like about TGSET that I don’t like about KOK, and vice versa of course. One of the former is the way Jesus’s miracles are handled. In this film, we see things like Jesus approaching a blind man who bumps into him as just a shadow on a wall. He stretches out his shadowy hand and the man drops his stick, obviously (I guess) cured. A madman is not portrayed as very mad (did you see the guy in “Jesus of Nazareth”? THAT was scary!) and in general the miracles are not quite glossed over but definitely not given the sense of drama and power that TGSET lavishes on them. Contrast the scene outside Lazarus’s tomb in the other movie with the one here --- oh no wait, don’t. “King of kings” doesn’t feature that miracle. What? Jesus’s biggest feat, his crowning glory, his piece de resistance, when he proves even Death can’t hold sway over someone he calls forth, and they don’t show it?

Yeah. The movie suffers from a massive dearth of miracles, and those that are shown are treated in an almost offhand, matter-of-fact way. No angels singing, no shafts of sunlight bathing the Saviour’s face as he performs these wonders, no crowds gathering to watch in amazement and then spread the word that the Messiah has come. Very drab and humdrum. Maybe there was a reason, maybe director Nicholas Ray didn’t want to focus too much on the miracles aspect of the story, but come on! The guy raised the dead! He healed the blind and the lame! He cast out demons! You have to show those, and make them an important part of the story.

But where “King of Kings” fails in respect of its opponent --- Miracles: Greatest Story Ever Told 1, King of Kings 0 --- it walks all over it (I know: I was going to say something else but figured it wouldn’t be appropriate when dealing with these movies. Gotta have respect, even if you don’t believe!) on another score, and that is the portrayal of Judas Iscariot. From an early age, we Irish were brought up on the notion that Judas was evil. He betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but we were never told why. We never asked. It was just accepted, the same as any religious dogma in Ireland at the time was. WHY had you to fast before receiving Holy Communion? Why could you not touch it if it got stuck to the roof of your mouth --- as it always, without fail, did --- and why were you supposed to (in my parents’ day, not mine) genuflect if you met a priest in the street? Nobody asked these questions: they weren’t even rhetorical, they just weren’t accepted as questions. They just were, okay? Accept it and stop asking stupid questions. In the very same way, Judas was a betrayer, a coward and a traitor and you should hate him.

It wasn’t till I watched “Jesus Christ Superstar” (already reviewed) and Martin Scorsese’s excellent “The last temptation of Christ” (to be reviewed soon) that I got the idea that Judas was not just an evil figure, he was a person; a person with ideals and hopes and dreams, and that he betrayed Jesus for a reason. This made more sense, and indeed this is the tack that “King of kings” takes. Judas is a revolutionary when we meet him, fighting alongside Barabbas, his leader, and he believes he can turn Jesus to their cause, convince him to fight for Judea and call down hosts of angels, or at the worst, lead his hosts of followers against the Roman oppressor. When he sees this will not happen of its own accord, that Jesus is dedicated to peace, Judas tries to force his hand, hoping that if he is arrested he will spring into action and defend himself, and become an ally of he and Barabbas, leading the Jews to glorious liberation.

At last, someone gets it. I’m no connoisseur of movies about Jesus, but I think I’m safe in saying that “King of kings” was the first of this genre to look sympathetically at Judas. Tim Rice would do so ten years later, and others would too: even in “Jesus of Nazareth” I seem to recall him being a more rounded, less cartoon-villain figure, but this was the first time I think anyone had voiced the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Judas had a reason, excuse or agenda in betraying his master. Played by Rip Torn, he’s certainly a better character here than in George Stevens’ somewhat pompous oversimplification of the man. In TGSET Barabbas is only mentioned at the end, when he gets his freedom at the expense of Christ’s, and he has no other role at all to play in that movie. Here, he is a pivotal if not central figure, laughing at then briefly sharing Judas’s hope that they might ally with the Messiah, finally using his speech at the temple to launch an abortive attack on his enemy. When he realises later that Jesus is dying in his place (not that he has a choice of course, but the people have chosen Barabbas) he asks “Why? I never did anything for him.” He truly can’t understand it, though Lucius, the Roman general, scowls “Your people shouted loudest”, obviously at pains to make the rebel leader realise it is only simple good fortune that has secured his freedom, and his life.

Although much shorter than its later companion film, “King of kings” gets pretty much the whole story in, which of course you would expect and demand, but also manages to presage it with the arrival of Pompey as he claims Jerusalem and sets up a garrison there, and adds in elements of the later Jewish struggle for independence and freedom, as well as alluding to the Roman governor, Pilate’s wife being somewhat sympathetic to Jesus, or at least his message. Again though, the two movies differ vastly when it comes to the crucifixion scene, with TGSET losing out as it watches much of the action from far off, down the hill at Golgotha. I’m not saying I wanted closeups of the nails going into Jesus’s hands or anything, but there’s a more personal, intimate feeling to the scene in this film, with the action all taking place in front of you; you see Christ nailed to the cross (tastefully done) and raised up, you see people moving about below him as he hangs there, you see the two thieves talk to him (although in fairness you see this in the other movie too, but I think this one just about edges it in terms of drama) and best of all, there’s no John Wayne!

Resurrection, I’d say there’s very little between the two movies, though this one does just end with the shadow of Christ falling across the apostles, who then sort of wander aimlessly offscreen in the final scene; where it actually shows Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene outside the tomb in this movie, in TGSET she just meets the angel inside the tomb once Jesus has risen, so again I think this one is slightly more personal. Not to mention that in the closing scene of this we see the smiling, radiant face of Jesus while in the other movie he’s just a shadow and a voice. Interestingly, the very same end hymn is used, though it seems to be quite appropriate and was probably the only one that could have been used.

So, both movies represent the story of Christ’s birth, life and death reasonably well, and certainly better than some have down the years. But each has its own flaws, and while in one category TGSET triumphs, in others it’s KOK that lands the killer punch. So, which movie is better? How can we even choose between two such classics? We probably in reality can’t, but for the purposes of this article we have to: to quote “Highlander” --- there can be only one. So how do we do that? Well, let’s list off the main points and compare like for like, and see how we do. For each scene, aspect or fact considered I’ll award a score out of ten, explaining along the way how I arrived at that score. Then we’ll total them up and see who comes out on top, or if this ends up being a dead heat. Even I don’t know at this point. Oooh! Exciting, isn’t it?

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Urban Hat€monger ?

I don't think Blake's 7 had better writing than Doctor Who. I think Blake's 7 strength was it had more defined characters and a bigger regular cast that it could write for.
It was the interplay between the characters that made it compelling to watch.

I don't think it's a coincidence that my favourite Blake's 7 episodes were written by Robert Holmes who consistently wrote some of Doctor Who's best stories over a 17 year period and who was script editor during the peak of it's popularity during Tom Baker's first 3 series.

__________________

Unknown Soldier

As you know I couldn't disagree with you more on original Doctor Who. The concept is actually amazing and still the best I've seen in a sci-fi series. I would say as far as science fiction world's go it's the richest and most diverse sci-fi world out there and more interesting than the Star trek universe overall. Trek probably has a larger worldwide fanbase for the simple reason it gave better attention to its aesthetics and its brilliant use of colour back in the 1960s and then moved into big budget movies in the 1980s. Also the concept of Trek is far more realistic of course than Doctor Who could ever be, but who necessarily wants realism in a sci-fi series? Sure the acting and sets on Doctor Who were generally bad but the stories and races pretty amazing and of course every series has its dire episodes (which Urban is covering) Doctor Who as a series is really an acquired taste.

Doctor Who was always amazing for me for the simple reason that I grew up with the novels of the series and like with every novel you visualize everything. Despite growing up with the BBC and in the UK old Doctor Who back then was very seldom repeated and you'd get the odd showing and I mean odd showing of the older series. Most Who followers just had to watch the current series as it was and as you said there was no video releases of the older stories for many a year, which made the novels of all the earlier Doctors an amazing thing to have.

Blake's 7 another amazing series and right out of the 70s Who catalogue for style. It was far bleaker than Who and had a greater character development and kind of goes hand in hand with 70s Who.

I've now got more into new Who, but the series is far less interesting than the classic series and like most shows today it's largely aimed at getting ratings.

__________________
Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Trollheart

As fas as B7 goes, I would agree that to some extent the interaction between the characters was one of the things that made the show (remember Avon trying to convince Vila that he needed him to help dump the neutron star fragment, when only moments before he had been quite willing to kick him off the ship in order to lighten the load?) but I think the stories were really good too. The whole idea of Blake being railroaded and becoming a reluctant revolutionary, and Avon's eventual rise to power was pretty unique in sci-fi, even drama of the time.

But it was either a clever twist or a really bad idea to call the authority in the show the Federation, and more, to make them evil. People --- myself definitely included --- had grown up with the idea of Star Trek's Federation, and they were definitely seen as the good guys (until DS9 skewed things), so to get used to the idea of the Federation being the evil oppressors was I think hard. And they could have called them anything; why the Federation I never understood. But yes, between Blake's 7 and Space:1999 (another one under consideration: can I have three extra sets of arms grafted on please? Oh, and make the day 30 hours long while you're at it!) they were two of the darkest sci-fi shows on telly, long before the likes of Galactica or Babylon 5 showed up.

I do admit my memory of classic Who is very hazy but other than I think "The Green Death" I don't recall being excited about any of the stories. I would seriously argue that "New Who" is MORE interesting than "Classic Who", though I guess I can't really as I don't remember that much of the latter. However I think it's definitely come on in leaps and bounds, though in some ways it has become something of a parody of itself to a degree. I'm not sure it's a show you can be into both sides of: seems like you're either a Classic nut or a Current nut (not bun); guess which side I fall on?

Still, I'll be interested in both your comments when my coverage does begin. If either of you know how to get at Blake's 7 without having to shell out for the DVDs please let me know. Netflix ain't got it and I don't see anything on YouTube, and these days it's almost impossible for me to(r)rent anything, if yiz get my drift... I think I'd like to take it on, but I need a source.

Oh yeah: throw Space:1999 in there too. God, when will I ever sleep?

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

I imagine Star Trek got more notice simply for being American. We don't get BBC shows here. I almost never recognize any of the shows Trollheart keeps mentioning.

__________________

Unknown Soldier

I know the names of nearly all the British shows that Trollheart mentions, but have seen very few of them as I'm not really a TV series person. You should check out classic Doctor Who and Blake's 7 as I'm sure you'd like them or at least appreciate what they're all about.

__________________
Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Urban Hat€monger ?

blakes7rocks: his videos on Dailymotion

__________________

Trollheart

Oh man! Thank you!!! Sweet!

(I guess this means I gotta do it now, huh?)

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Unknown Soldier

Dailymotion is also great for classic and new Who as well.

__________________
Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Trollheart

Season Two, Episode One

The last time we saw Darren he was sprawled on the ground with a bullet in him. He had gone to Huey’s wake, to make peace with John Boy before heading back to Spain. He wanted to know that his sister and her family would be safe if he went. John Boy assured him “I’m not an animal”, but Stumpy had other ideas, and exacted his revenge with a drive-by shooting as Darren walked away from the pub. Doctors fought to save his life as he hovered close to death, close to being reunited too soon with his dead brother and perhaps the man who killed him over what amounted to a piddling small debt. A year has passed, and things have changed in the criminal underworld. Shaken more than he would like to admit by the loss of his brother, John Boy believes Huey has remained behind, and swears he sees what he often describes as “the ghost” late at night, but nobody else has seen this apparition, and privately his rapidly-growing obsession is making him something of a laughing stock and he is losing the respect of his gang. Not that they would say as such to his face, of course.

The Gardai raid John Boy’s apartment, the CAB (Criminal Assets Bureau, a special unit set up by the Justice Department to target the illegal takings of criminals and seize them) taking his car and all his files. He’s less than happy and tells his lawyer to sort it out, while he orders Nidge to collect all the debts that have been owing. Today. Darren, who has managed to pull through his life-threatening injuries, is talking to Rosie, who is over on a visit, having moved back to London, anxious to put all the Stumpy business behind her. Losing the baby, coming close to death herself has taken all she has, and she is in no mood for Darren’s constant attentions when he won’t commit to her.

Darren, for his part, has cut his ties with John Boy and the gang and is working for a smalltime hustler called Fran, who deals mostly in cheap cannabis and dodgy cigarettes. Fran is almost as mental as Darren’s old boss, but he has to make money somehow, and god forbid he should do anything drastic like get a real job! With his record, I guess, they wouldn’t exactly be lining up to offer him a position, now would they? The job doesn’t last long though, as Darren takes exception to Fran’s method of collecting what’s owed to him, which basically entails him setting his rottweiler dogs on a guy. Darren steps in and batters one of the dogs to death when Fran refuses to call it off, and as a result is fired, with the added pressure of now owing Fran thirty thousand Euro, which reminds him is a debt now due in full.

John Boy fires his lawyer, Pat, accusing him of not doing enough to “keep him out of trouble”, and then accusing him of maybe selling him out, asking if Pat has had his office checked for bugs recently? He’s incensed that the Gardai seem to know every move he makes ahead of time, and is convinced someone is ratting him out. Fran calls to Mary’s house, threatening to get the money Darren owes him from her if he can’t locate her brother. He tells her that her house was done up with part of the money and now he wants it back. She sends him packing, but is trembling visibly. Darren, meanwhile, is having flashbacks to when he was shot, when Mary calls him to chew him out over Fran. He says he’ll sort it and apologises. He goes to see Nidge to ask him if he can loan him the money, but Nidge says he hasn’t got it. He floats the idea of approaching John Boy, pointing out that it was Stumpy who shot Darren, that he did it on his own and there was no order given by his boss. With nowhere left to turn, Darren reluctantly agrees, knowing he has no choice but to climb back in bed with the devil.

When he hears John Boy may be covering the debt, Fran asks Nidge to see if he can get him in with John Boy. What Fran has is small time; he wants to break into the big leagues. Nidge agrees to ask, but John Boy refuses to stump up the money, saying that if Nidge is so worried he can cover the debt himself. Nidge pushes though, pointing out that with Darren off the police’s radar now --- having been shot and no longer part of the gang they don’t have any further current interest in him --- they could use him, and also he declares Fran’s interests to join up with them, telling John Boy Fran is making decent money that they could have a slice of. Eventually John Boy sees the logic and gives in, agreeing to pay Darren’s debt, knowing that the kid will owe him big.

At Pat’s home Stumpy throws a petrol bomb at the door as it’s answered, but it’s the lawyer’s daughter who comes to the door, not him, and she is badly burned. Darren has formed a loose friendship with Luke, the kid he rescued from Fran’s dogs; the two are hanging around a bit now. They go to John Boy’s party (well, it’s a party for someone called Pottsy, but everyone’s going there to meet the gang boss and “do business”) as does Fran and his girlfriend Linda, whom Nidge knows from way back and takes an instant re-shine to. She, more or less ignored by Fran, is delighted and puffed up at the attention, while John Boy’s junkie girlfriend Debbie tries to wheedle some gear out of Tommy. Fran explodes when he notices Luke wearing his jumper: Darren’s mate took it when he burgled Fran’s house, presumably in a weak retaliation for Fran having set his dogs on him. He goes for him, but is restrained by Nidge and the others. John Boy follows Darren outside and reminds him that he is now indebted to the crime boss, and when John Boy says be there, Darren had better be there.

Despite his best efforts, Darren is being pulled back into the frame, back into the world of organised crime, and never before did the phrase “I keep trying to get out, they keep pulling me back in!” seem more appropriate, or tragically true.

QUOTES
John Boy: “There’s this disease, you can only get it from fucking dead bodies. My brother Huey knew this fella, worked in the morgue. Two or three times a week he’d get a knock on the door, middle of the night, offered cash he was, for them to hop up on the dead.”
Debbie: “That’s sick!”
John Boy: “Sure, you’re dead. What do you care who mucks off into ya?”

Rosie: “I don’t want you waiting with me.”
Darren: “Why not?”
Rosie: “You know why not. Cos you can’t keep acting like we’re still together every time I see you.”
Darren: “We’re friends.”
Rosie: “Friends don’t act like this.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Like waiting at bus stops.”
Darren: “Oh! Friends don’t wait at bus stops for other friends, no?”
Rosie: “No. And the other stuff.”
Darren: “What other stuff?”
Rosie: “Talking.”
Darren: “Oh so friends don’t talk to each other, no?”
Rosie: “Not the way you talk to me.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Messing. Making me laugh.You know you’re doing it, I know you do.”
Darren: “What am I doing?”
Rosie: “Making me fall in love with you.”

Nidge: “What’s he got to be depressed about?” (talking about Darren)
Tommy: “What do you think?”
Nidge: “Didn’t have his bollocks shot off did he, like the soldiers in fucking Iraq! You get a roadside bomb underneath you, you put your hand down to see if your balls are still there and it’s a pound of mincemeat is in your pants! That’d make you depressed!”

Tommy (after they’ve tried and failed to get the full amount owing): “Do you think he doesn’t have it then?”
Nidge: “I know he doesn’t have it.”
Tommy: “What are you going to say to John Boy?”
(Nidge gives him a harassed look, that says that no matter what he says, no matter how well he puts it or how sympathetic he comes across to his boss, John Boy is not going to be happy and will likely send them back to extract, shall we say, alternative payment? John Boy does not like people to owe him money. Well, he does, but he wants them to pay up, and if they can’t, he doesn’t care what happens to them. They’re no use to him. Besides, it always serves as a good example that you don’t welch or drag out a debt you owe him.)

Nidge: “I can’t believe it! A child of mine being picked on!”
(Nidge is more worried about his image here than his son. How can other kids be bullying his son? His son should be the one doing the bullying! This is bad, as it reflects poorly on Nidge’s hard man image, never mind what it’s doing to Warren.)

John Boy: “I don’t give a fuck about Stumpy. To be honest the prick bugs the shit out of me. But you end up on a job with him I don’t want any bollocks.”
(The task of a boss: to make sure that, whether they like each other or not, his staff work together and all personal baggage is left at home. As true in the criminal underworld as, if not more than, anywhere else.)

FAMILY
It’s a real feature of Love/Hate that, no matter what nefarious deeds the guys are up to, rather like “The Sopranos”, they still have to do the little things we all deal with in our lives, the boring, mundane, everyday chores that make up family life. Nidge, on the way to extract money from people with menaces, has to pick up Warren from school and drop him home to Trish. John Boy would, I’m sure, not be impressed! Also, when Nidge drops Warren home Trish is sitting on the sofa watching TV. Why could she not collect their son?

On the way to perform a heinous deed for his boss, Stumpy gets a call from his mother. She has apparently seen a strange man looking in her window, and he rushes to the house. It’s weird to realise that these people, vile and evil and unprincipled and psychopathic as they are, have mothers who love them. It’s almost surreal.

HONOUR AMONG THIEVES
As I’ve been at pains to point out all through season one, this is a fallacy and a fantasy, and it shows here more than in any other crime show. These people are not friends, they’re merely people who band together for a common cause: literally, partners in crime. When one of them gets hurt, hassled, imprisoned or even killed it doesn’t seem to affect the others, unless that can damage them in some way. I mentioned about how when Elmo had the colostomy bag in season one and all Huey could do was laugh at him, leading to his death that might have been prevented if Elmo had rushed him to hospital instead of allowing him to bleed to death in the street. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Here, as Darren recovers from his shooting, nobody seems to care. Nidge plays down what happened, reasoning that it’s not as bad as getting blown up by an IED in Iraq, and when Darren goes to plead with him to help him out by loaning him the money he owes Fran, Nidge smiles lopsidedly and says he hasn’t got it. Of course he has, or could get it, but he’s not interested in helping someone he now probably sees as something of a liability.

FRAN THE MAN
In season one we had Huey as the head-the-ball, but as this season and future ones develop we will come to see that he has one hell of a successor for a psycho among psychos in Fran, who will become a major player, sometimes allied to, sometimes ranged against the gang. Fran is a dog man, that is, he breeds dogs for fights, and he thinks more of his dogs than he does of most people. He is enraged when Darren kills one of them, moreso than when the troubled gangster turns the club on him, hitting him in the face. To Fran, his dogs are his babies and god help anyone who hurts them. After the incident, Fran knows he has Darren, who owes him a huge amount of money, but unlike John Boy (“I’m not some sort of animal!”) he has no compunction about going to see Darren’s sister to demand money from her in the absence of her brother. Like Huey in season one, it seems there is little Fran will shy from, and few if any people he is afraid of. He doesn’t even fear John Boy, who everyone else lives in terror of upsetting. As psychos, they’re almost matched.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW
As was noted briefly in season one, the rules surrounding what can be done about the earnings of criminals and the profits from enterprises proven to be illegal have been tightened up in recent years here in Ireland, with the establishment of CAB, the Criminal Assets Bureau. This organisation tracks the financial assets of known or suspected criminals, pursues writs through the court system and eventually seizes any “ill-gotten gains” in terms of property, land, material wealth or anything else that can be proven to have been bought by the proceeds of crime. As we will see later, this seizure can extend beyond the criminal, to anyone he or she has bought something for that was purchased with money obtained illegally.

This is how the major criminal gangs and godfathers in the recent past have often been taken down here: with their clubs, houses, cars and businesses seized by CAB they have no earning potential and they eventually face the full wrath of the law with no financial backing to help them fight their case. Strip away the assets and leave the man legally naked beneath, and then move in for the kill. It’s a process that has worked for over a decade now, and has required the cleverer criminals to get even more creative, putting property in the names of their wives, family members and so on, in an effort to hide it from the CAB.

Pat, the lawyer for John Boy, also recognises that he is under observation. Under the new money laundering rules, someone who suspects they may be involved in such activity, or knows someone who may be, is bound by law to report it. He has no intention of losing his licence, or worse, serving prison time, but is perhaps rather silly to intimate to the gangster boss that he may be in a position where he is forced to turn him in. John Boy does not treat betrayal of any kind lightly!

PHILOSOPHY OF THE STREET
John Boy waxes lyrical on the life of a gangster: “Load of bullshit you read in the papers, you know? You get into this, whatever, and you do something because it has to be done, and then somebody wants to do something to you, you don’t let them, and then you’re watching your back all the time. I’m not stupid, like some of them. And the papers are full of shit. But you know what? The only bit of it that’s true: you don’t get out of it you’re dead.”

GANGSTER PARADISE?
One thing that really impresses me about Carolan’s writing in this series is that he manages to maintain a great balance between making the life of a criminal exciting and powerful, and showing the reality of it what it does to other people, to the gangsters’ families, their loved ones. Collateral damage piles up, and they don’t care. They snipe at each other, as John Boy says above, watching their backs, each knowing the day is coming when they will be the target, when they must kill or be killed by the people they currently count as, if not their friends, then at least their allies. The world they inhabit is dark and scary, and bleak and unforgiving. Behind the parties, the money, the whores and the trips abroad, the car chases, the codewords and the camaraderie of the pub, they’re all just waiting for that knock on the door, or the boot through it, the day when they stare down the barrel of a Glock and see the impassive face of a man they thought was their friend, getting them before they’re got themselves.

Carolan never lets us forget this, never lets us get lost in the fantasy and the glamour, never lets us close the door on the darkness; it’s always open, sometimes only a crack, and the stench of evil and fear and paranoia and revenge and betrayal and madness all filter through it like it’s a gateway to Hell itself, and it’s a door we fear to walk through but wonder what’s behind it? It’s also a door we’re very glad we don’t have to pass through, because what lies on the far side, as O'Brien says in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the very worst thing imaginable. It may all seem like fun now, but we are never allowed to forget that it will, and can, only end one way: in death, despair, hatred and betrayal. The only certainty in the world of the gangland criminal is the dark, dread stone of the grave, a deep dark hole yawning wide, waiting its chance to swallow everyone who gets mixed up in this evil enterprise.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018