The Black General

Brigadier-General Horace Sewell was one of the most distinguished British cavalry officers of the First World War.

In action from the very start of British involvement on the Western Front, he survived the desperate mounted charge with cold steel against artillery and machine guns at Audrigines on 24th August 1914. By March 1915, he had risen to command his regiment, while battlefield bravery won him a DSO in June. A grateful French Republic bestowed the Légion d'honneur the next year. Earning a bar to his DSO at Cambrai in 1917, he was promoted to command the 1st Cavalry Brigade in April 1918, which he led until the war's end - the youngest British cavalry general in the Great War. He was twice wounded, five times mentioned in dispatches, and, after the Armistice, inducted into the noble Order of St Michael and St George. Only a knighthood or a Victoria Cross would have been higher honours.

At first sight, General Sewell appears to have been a conventional hero of a hundred years ago: a younger son of a Victorian gentleman, born in a Welsh mansion and raised in a Gothic castle on the Isle of Wight, he attended Harrow and Cambridge before joining the Army in 1900. On leave in 1916, he married a New York heiress (very much the "in thing" in those days), and after the War, he acquired a medieval manor house in Warwickshire, a coat of arms, and the requisite entry in Burke's Landed Gentry. His son later married a sister of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, co-heiress of the longest noble pedigree in the British Isles.

In World War II, General Sewell was sent to Washington, D.C., to head up the British public-relations campaign in the USA. He became the prototype of the retired general who enlivens the TV news with informed commentary, and took advantage of his posting in America to spend more time at the Jamaican mansion he had inherited from his elder brother.

That last detail conceals a truth that passes without mention in the memoirs of his comrades, and the biographical sketches that grace the pages of family histories and society almanacs.

Horace Sewell was, as his American acquaintances of the 1940s succinctly put it, "black".

The British general was the grandson of a Caribbean slave.

Mary McCrea was the property of Colonel Malcolm, the pious Scottish proprietor of a Jamaican sugar plantation. William Sewell was the Colonel's accountant, a man with a short, pugilistic temper and a physique to match, born apparently in England's tough north-west and bred in London's rough East End.

Jamaican tradition describes the romance of the slave girl and the book-keeper as a love match, and when the pious Colonel insisted that Mr. Sewell needed to marry a white woman or resign his post, he simply walked out. Mary followed, along with their son Henry.

They opened a small store in a village nearby, selling rum and other supplies. It was an unconventional decision for a white man on Jamaica in the 1830s, but perhaps it was the natural response of a mixed-race couple to the sudden transformation of the island's society. The enslaved population won full emancipation in 1838, and most of them promptly left the plantations to settle down in small communities in the backwoods. Without the inhuman social division of slavery, with no way to compel a large labour force to work for low overheads, conventional wisdom said that the days of the great sugar plantations were over.

Colonel Malcolm's heirs moved back to Argyll, and invented the West Highland Terrier.

But now, William Sewell saw an opportunity. The plantation owners were selling out for any price they could get, shifting to bananas or cutting back production; but the accountant and shopkeeper knew that a collapse in the sugar supply would be followed by a sharp rise in demand, and thus in prices and in profits. The story goes that the agent for a group of absentee owners, desperate to sell, offered to loan him the capital he needed to buy them out; he talked it over with Mary, and they took the risk. Another plantation followed, and another. Within twenty years, William Sewell had built up a vast "sugar empire", and moved from his little rum shop to one of the island's grandest mansions.

The Sewells sent their mixed-race son Henry back to England, where he seems to have taken some pride in the scandal of being a "nigger from Jamaica"; he married a respectable English wife, and the family settled in some style at Llanwrin in Wales, where Horace Somerville Sewell, the future general, was born in 1881. Later, giving up Plas Llwyngwern to the Marquis of Londonderry's sister, they moved to the even grander Steephill Castle overlooking the English Channel; but they always tried to spend part of the year in Arcadia, their eighteenth-century mansion on Jamaica - courtesy of the three-masted sugar clipper Vale Royal, which doubled as a family yacht.

Jamaican historians have described Henry Sewell as "structurally white", a man whose economic power made his origins irrelevant. Contemporary writers pass over his mixed-race ancestry in silence, and the family tradition describes Mary McCrea as a mulatto with a white father, even an admiral's daughter - a claim that, her modern descendants have suggested, may be rather whitewashed.

Jamaican history says that she was happy in her widowhood with a little self-sufficient croft, saving her annual revenue from her son's plantations: when one of her granddaughters, Horace's sister, fell in love with a man who Henry regarded as unsuitable, she provided the girl with a handsome dowry and told her to marry the man she loved.

Presumably she spent time with her youngest grandson, too.

This, then, was the background of Brigadier-General H.S. Sewell, CMG, DSO (and bar), commanding officer of the 4th Dragoon Guards and the 1st Cavalry Brigade on the Western Front.

In hindsight, it seems obvious why the General's nickname was "Sambo", but until the truth was known, scholars simply put this down to the arcane logic of the British soldier, perhaps connected to his three-year secondment leading native troops in West Africa before the war, perhaps to some private joke.

Modern historians were nonplussed when the real reason for his nom de guerre emerged.

But what is more remarkable is that no-one mentioned it. Comrades remembered Sewell as a handsome man (as his father had been), wearing civilian riding-breeches to war, brown corduroy in preference to his uniform jodhpurs. They didn't think it was worth mentioning why they called him Sambo.

Such attitudes weren't completely unprecedented: shortly before the War, a major English novellist had created a plucky mixed-race heiress as a memorable literary heroine (and, like the officers of the 4th Dragoon Guards, he didn't bother to spell it out for the reader, either).

To an extent, these omissions were obviously a way of tacitly stepping around conventional prejudices - they may even be a way of negotiating the writers' own prejudices; but even if they were, they also indicate a tacit truth. In the absence of the enforced barriers that had been supposed to embody a black-and-white distinction between one human being and another, that distinction ceased to exist at all.

Old Etonian officers and strapping young troopers from the Home Counties followed the grandson of a Jamaica slave, the man they called Sambo: they followed him willingly, with drawn sabres, into the shrapnel of the Western Front.

It is somewhat sobering to note that Horace Sewell remains the only general officer in the history of the British Army to be identified as "black".

The Secret of the Radcliffe Camera

The Radcliffe Camera stands in central Oxford, a large domed building in the neoclassical style: all columns and squared masonry and decorative swags. Its lead-clad cupola provides a distinctive piece of punctuation in the city’s spire-pinnacled skyline, and the tawny ashlar facade makes a lovely visual centrepiece in a little pedestrianized square.

It’s especially useful as a backdrop for the ITV detective dramas and quirky Holywood movies that like to film in the city. It’s one of the great buildings of England.

The students, of course, know that the "Rad Cam" is a library - although it’s a slightly impractical one, often regarded with a faint sense of irony, as if its ostensible role isn’t quite to be taken seriously.

They’re right about this, with the instinctive awareness that smart young people so often have. The Radcliffe Camera contains the requisite panoply of books, student desks and Bodleian staff, but it isn’t really a library at all; that’s simply what it’s used as, not what it truly is.

It’s actually a Jacobite sight-gag, a massive, bizarrely inappropriate statement of sympathy for a Scottish political movement of the eighteenth century.

No, really. Trust me?

The Jacobites, in case you need a reminder, were those subjects of the British crown who refused to accept the exile of the Stuart royal dynasty in 1688. Many went into exile with their kings, many more involved themselves in repeated civil wars to try and oust the Dutch and German rulers who they saw as usurpers.

Now, there were Irish, English and Welsh Jacobites, but as you would expect for the uncompromising supporters of a Scottish dynasty, Jacobitism was primarily a Scottish movement, with its "heart in the Highlands": when an English regiment was added to the Jacobite army in 1745, they were expected to wear tartan like all the rest.

Unfortunately, by the time the Radcliffe Camera was inaugurated in 1749, the Jacobites were effectively out of business: their last chance of ousting the Hanoverian dynasty had ended three yeers earlier when Bonnie Prince Charlie ran away after Culloden; but Oxford is probably the only place in England that would have built a massive visual homage to a defunct Scottish political movement.

And so they did.

The first key to unlock the true meaning of this Jacobite monument is the unusual architecture: built on a monumental scale, a tall vertical volume beneath a dome, symmetrical in plan and without any flanking ranges or exedrae to disrupt the monolithic form.

Small rotunda buildings of similar design are found in the baroque architecture of Italy, derived from Roman mausoleums: the most famous is Bramante’s Tempietto, a tiny chapel in the courtyard of a monastery’s cloister; and James Gibbs, the architect of the Rad Cam, was certainly a disciple of the Italian baroque school; but the Rad Cam is, as far as I can tell, unique in its scale and non-religious role.

Large secular buildings with a dome over a tall block with a strict radial symmetry and no flanking wings existed only in one place: the Jacobite imagination, particularly in the work of Gibbs’ friend, collaborator and patron the Earl of Mar.

These imagined buildings were fantasy redesigns of the traditional Scottish castle. The tall, battlemented towers that were the prestige statements of the Stuart kingdom’s national architecture, given a neoclassical translation in a series of proposals for rebuilding and homage: an architecture of exile that would be put into action by the supporters of the House of Stuart when they reclaimed the kingdom from which they had been exiled.

Now, let’s look at the Radcliffe Camera again: a bulky, vertical tower, with no flanking ranges to distract from its impact, and sculptural detail firmly subordinated to the geometry of the volume: defined by the “Streight Line without any breaking”, as in Mar’’s language of Jacobite architecture and in the disciplined facades of Scottish castle keeps.

Inside, the ground floor is a brooding, heavily vaulted undercroft that seems almost like an arsenal; it was accessed originally through heavy gates of gridded iron bars: an unconventional sort of doorway for any sort of building in England, but the traditional prestige entrance in Scotland, where they’re known as yetts.

A winding stair takes the visitor up into the main interior space, a huge room lit by windows set in deep embrasures, connected by passages in the massive depth between the inner and outer walls, and covered by a plasterwork vault: a Scottish great hall, deconstructed into the architectural language of Vitruvius in the form of an annular collonade around a circular central space. The white stucco decoration on the vault evokes the flamboyant interiors of seventeenth-century Scottish exemplars (though in a bizarre twist, much of the Rad Cam’s “stucco” was actually carved stone disguised as plasterwork).

The mezzanine galleries also have a place in the Jacobites’ castle-derived classicism, but I suspect their true meaning is more complicated and more sophisticated than an over-extended homage to the late-medieval entresol: the circular open space between the gallery balustrades, and indeed the circular opening that unites the main space with the vaulted dome above, represent an adaption of the oubliette, the central lightwell that Mar introduced into the Jacobite architectural grammar, derived from the thirteenth century via his ancestral donjon at Kildrummy.

The abstract monumentality of the building and the baroque guise of the detailing have transformed this gothic detail beyond all sense of practicality, but the architectural language is all the more distinctively Jacobite for that.

And, surmounting the whole composition: an encircling battlement, and a caphouse, originally intended to be stone-flagged, but eventually finished in an equally appropriate covering of lead sheeting. These baroque battlements are accessed from indoors by a separate stair, firmly disconnected from the main entrance flight, and modestly concealed behind a doorway.

It may be circular. It may be neoclassical in every detail of its architecture. It may be pretending to be a library, and located in central Oxford.

But the Radcliffe Camera is actually a Scottish castle.

And having commissioned a Jacobite architect to build this Jacobite building, the University proceeded to top it out with a ceremony that proves they knew exactly what they were doing. The centrepiece of the inauguration was an extended double entendre in Latin, delivered to a packed audience in the Sheldonian Theatre: ostensibly a conventional oration about how the new library symbolized a restoration of ancient virtue and wisdom at the expense of corrupt modern values; but really a political speech calling for the return of the Stuart dynasty.

It was, by all accounts, very well received.

It’s hard to know how serious this Jacobite statement was meant to be three years after Culloden; how much the funerary aesthetic of the rotunda model was a tacit acknowledgment that the Stuarts were a lost cause, or if the contrasting emphases of mourning and hope were intended as part of a paradoxical but coherent statement.

Regardless, we shouldn’t underestimate the intellectual and political sophistication of early modern Oxford - in 1683, they had impounded a new edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and made a bonfire of it in the Bodleain Library quad; the idea of a book-burning might have unpleasant connotations from more recent history, but this was one where everyone stood around singing cheerfully, warming themselves and (I think, though I can’t find a source for it right now) roasting chestnuts. It was, in short, an elegant disproval of Hobbes’ cynical ideology: a statement of the ability of ordinary human beings to organize themselves as a community and have some innocent fun, with no need for a powerful, controlling state to tell them what to do.

Of course, like many of the best jokes (such as Belgium), part of the fun of the Radcliffe Camera is that its architects don’t explain what they’re doing.

The building stands as an emphatically impressive public monument, a sculptural form and a statement on the skyline; but the underlying meaning is only visible to the cognoscenti, those who possess the deeper cultural perspectives that enable them to understand what’s going on -- or those who, in later ages, stumble piece by piece upon details that reveal a glimpse of the true story: Oxford’s silent tribute (and majestic statement) in honour of the Jacobite cause.

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The images used in this piece are sourced from Wikipedia, where they were authored by User:Supergolden and Newton2 respectively, and made available for reproduction under the Gnu Free Documentation License, which by my understanding governs their use here and all other reproduction, right?

Random Movie Week #4: Coriolanus

My plan to see Coriolanus on Thursday went awry, but I managed to catch it this afternoon; and I'm glad I did, because it's an excellent film.

It's also a very different film from the other three I've caught this week, far more austere: this is a low-budget independent movie, so it just has a cast of A-list actors led by the stars of The English Patient and Machine Gun Preacher, an army of real Main Battle Tanks and Humvees, and a script by William Shakespeare.

Do you need anything else?

Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's less-well-known plays, although no less an authority than T.S. Eliot thought it was his best. It tells the story of the Roman general Coriolanus, a man of inflexible strength, and the betrayal that turned him against his city.

This is regarded as a difficult play; but it's also one that has resonated down the centuries, fitting unexpectedly in every new context: to Beethoven, it was about the spiritual isolation of the romantic hero; Eliot saw in it an image of the rise of fascism, a deadly farce; to Brecht, it was a Marxist parable; and today, in the hands of Ralph Fiennes - director, producer and lead actor - it serves as a mirror for our fragmented, photo-manipulated, tribally sophisticated society.

This film updates the action from the fifth century B.C. into a modern Balkan landscape, where characters like General Martius and the hill-country tribal warlord Aufidius fit effortlessly; to add to the effect, there are some odd incongruities - the Romans retain their classical paganism, but the iconography of the rival Volsces is Christian, perhaps specifically Catholic like the Croats: the result is a story that defies time and place while remaining rooted in the visceral realities of belief and nationalism, and the way they unravel in war; needless to say, the play also finds very contemporary resonance in the events of the Arab Spring.

The production also modernizes by making the story interact with the rhythms of the media age, slicing the script into soundbites, overlapping sections of dialogue and intercutting different scenes, as arguments interrupt speeches and broadcasts silence conversations: the interplay between screen and audience, inherent in any movie, appears in diverse and effective ways. The script isn't afraid to make dramatic edits, either - one character, who survives in Shakespeare's play, commits a Roman suicide in this version. Blood from slit wrists dribbles from smart white shirt cuffs; there's no sense of incongruity in the combination of ancient and contemporary elements, nor in the violent change to the narrative. It's only with hindsight that I realise how disparate the well-integrated the components of this film are: the setting they combine to create is completely believable.

Not every juxtaposition is completely successful, of course: there's a coyness to the opening, which seems a little shy to introduce the unfamiliar cadences of Renaissance dialogue alongside its harshly-framed news-camera images; but thankfully, this problem quickly resolves itself, and after the first ten or twenty minutes, there's only the occasional stumble on the poetic rhythms of the dialogue.

It seems churlish to say that Fiennes, who is almost single-handedly responsible for this movie and its triumph, suffers most from this in the opening scenes: perhaps because he was directing himself for the first time, perhaps because his jagged, abrasive interpretation of the character is deliberately biting at his own poetry; perhaps because his interpretation of his character seemed most at odds with the reading that Shakespeare's words suggest to me. But there's no question that this is a terrific performance: this proud, disciplined soldier is by turns savage, shell-shocked, tender, lost, and vengeful, both adamantine hero and all-too-knowing cynic.

Gerard Butler's Aufidius has some similar moments of strangeness, though this conveys an appropriate, ambiguous depth, with hints of a NCO's flatness under the fine words of the resistance General. The supporting performances are roundly excellent: Brian Cox as the amiable moderate Menenius, probably the moral core of the play, or at least the most likeable character; Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus' iron-willed mother; and as John Hannah the populist leader Brutus.

Impressively, one of the best performances was from the Balkan actor playing Aufidius' second-in-command: not only did he perform his lines flawlessly, but he did it with a Scottish accent; how many British stars could do the same in Serbo-Croat?

Another unexpected voice was that of Channel 4 News anchorman John Snow. His first newsflash provoked a loud, happy laugh from the audience, but he immediately silenced his critics, because his performance was excellent, effortlessly blending the metre of the script with his familiar newsroom rhythms to create something at once familiar and exotic, and giving the play an extra level of reality and strangeness that intensified its existing strengths.

But, just as important as the acting, this stripped version gives the energy and thrust of the play itself new emphasis.

To take one slow-burning example that's only really consummated in the final frames, the film draws out the homoerotic subtext in the dance of mutual obsession between Coriolanus and his opponent-turned-ally Aufidius; this is something that's definitely present in Shakespeare's original text, and it's presented as a natural development of their clash of physicality, ego and emotion, rather than being overplayed or thrust into the story for any sort of shock value. That sort of detail is truly striking, and gives this play an unexpected, almost shocking modernity.

That same modernity is evident in Shakespeare's candid take on politics - and particularly, on democratic politics. A conservative minority regime is holding power. Menenius, both liked and distrusted by everyone, candidly challenges the leaders of the populist opposition that they are only interested in their own ambitions; they respond by proving him right, and proceed to destroy a good man - and almost imperil their country. The electorate are portrayed in a way that rings true - a mix of cowardice and courage, confidence and weakness, at once sovereign and enslaved, driven above all else by their desire for freedom, and their fear of consequences: at once babel voices, and ultimate arbiters.

Not for nothing is Coriolanus one of the few works of literature that modern liberal democracies have banned.

But it's Coriolanus who is the centre of the film, and a particularly modern centre, his motives opaque, his actions a psychological puzzle. Perhaps he embodies Roman - and Renaissance - ideas of virtue, but these are undermined by his defection, and by the integrity he retains afterwards; he could be seen as a tragic protagonist, but it's hard to say whether he really has a fatal flaw, or if his disgrace is simply the result of opportunistic political dirty tricks - and hard, eventually, to feel pity for him. Instead, what we're given is a compelling, convincing portrait of a man, a certain type of man, his strengths locked up with his weaknesses, his emotions and his self-discipline inseparable; and it's a portrait that depicts its subject without trying to distill his complexity into explanations.

This film is a considerable triumph for Fiennes, his actors, and his largely Serbian team behind the camera; kudos also goes to screenwriter John Logan, whose eclectic resumé includes the CGI animated comedy Rango, Scorsese's Oscar-nominated fantasy Hugo, Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai, the dire final movie of the pre-reboot Star Trek franchise, the next James Bond movie and - perhaps most significantly of all - extensive rewrite work on Gladiator.

That last credit, which I found out about after writiing this review, is perhaps a little disappointing: Gladiator contains the same key themes we find here: jealous rivalry between generals, in an Ancient Rome where the parallels to modern mass-media and political culture are clearly drawn. The connection feels a little too knowing, a little too Hollywood.

Nonetheless, I don't think any of that is absent from the Shakespeare play; I don't think it takes away from the success of this film. And so I'll stick with my original conclusion.

This is a truly splendid movie, and one which brings alive a truly splendid work of literature, reiterating what connoisseurs have known for a long time; "Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success", in the words of perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century. And it still has everything to say to us today.

Random Movie Week #3: Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

A triumph! Guy Ritchie's second Sherlock Holmes movie, A Game of Shadows is an unadulterated triumph, and an uncomplicated joy. There's no question that it's also a very silly film, but none the worse for that.

A Game of Shadows is a very loose adaptation of The Final Problem, in which the Great Detective pursues the criminal mastermind Moriarty to a showdown on the Reichenbach Falls; as such, it shares its central conceit with the latest installment in the BBC's ultra-cool "modern-dress" retelling of the canon; but it avoids the knowing postmodernism that most respectable Holmes adaptations go for these days. Instead, we get set-piece scenes involving CPR and sub-machine-guns in 1891. In fact, it's not even that important that it's a Sherlock Holmes movie; it's really the successor of 1960s period romps like Royal Flash and The Assassination Bureau.

It is, in other words, the sort of film they're not supposed to make any more.

And it's great fun.

The inherent silliness of the film is expressed throughout in Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of the title character: this is a vainglorious Sherlock Holmes, as flawed and fallible as he is brilliant and bold; as vocal with his complaints as with his enthusiasms, a childish ubermensch.

The zesty implausibility is also bound up in the plot, and in the way that Holmes' abilities are presented here - not just razor-sharp senses, perfect memory and stimulant-fuelled analysis, but a pretenatural facility to extrapolate beyond these rational powers and predict the next move; this provides the driving force of the story, as the hero hurries from one clue to the next, in a race that has to keep up with the villains, and ahead of the audience's suspension of disbelief.

Yet at the same time, all this absurdity has a logical integrity within the character: his cross-dressing showiness and manic cogitations, his odd neuroses and his loud complaints, are the actions of a man who probably has to behave like this to keep the incipient insanity at bay; he's also far more fallible than he lets on - he makes a whole series of mistakes in this film, each of them quite literally fatal for some member of the cast, all of them reflecting a difficulty with incorporating the human factor in his brilliant problem-solving; and this Holmes is, however absurd he purports to be, a gentleman, with a great deal more going on in his head than we're allowed to see on-screen.

The sight of a volubly insecure Sherlock Holmes bouncing along on a Shetland pony is certainly a new take on the character. It's also, perhaps more importantly, laugh-out-loud funny.

The same mix of the silly and the serious is seen in Holmes' relationship with his elder brother Mycroft (a scene-stealing Stephen Fry); the running spat between "Mikey" and "Shirley" is huge fun, another light-hearted strand of comedy; yet at the same time, this dysfunctional sibling rivalry also provides further insights into Sherlock's vulnerability and attention-seeking - bear in mind that Mycroft, several years older and many pounds heavier, has inherited their father's castle and butler, while Sherlock is rootless in rented lodgings in 221B Baker Street.

The way that Downey plays Holmes also makes for an interesting contrast with the modern-day interpretation in BBC series; in both versions, the title character appears to be deeply needy, but whereas the BBC's version is driven by a very modern psychological angst, this big-screen Holmes is in no particular pursuit of a resolution for his personal issues (whatever he implies to Watson); his erratic behaviour is simply a way to keep things interesting.

On the surface, Jude Law's Watson seems more serious: bluff, tweedy, and unhesitatingly deadly with a gun; but his straight-man dignity is stretched well beyond the point of unacknowledged absurdity - and Holmes is constantly poking against it, which produces a lot of the spark in their relationship, while also calling attention to Watson's own strengths and motivations. There's no question that this is silly stuff - the dialogue between the characters is deadpan comedy worthy of Peter Cook and/or Chris Morris - but it's also satisfyingly well-constructed as a character piece, with a Campbellian underpinning that makes the chase about more than just stopping the bad guys.

And whereas the two previous films I caught this week had female assassins as their protagonists, this is resolutely old-fashioned in its use of relatively uncomplicated male heroes. True, they're joined by Noomi Rapace's knife-throwing Romany heroine, who shows that she's the equal of the boys, but she's not the fetishized centre of attention like the female leads of Haywire and Underworld: Awakening. And now I come to think about it, there's no question of any romance between her and either of the male leads, nor does there need to be. That, in itself, is refreshingly original.

This is a romantic film, of course - but not in the sense we understand it these days; it's romantic in the sense of a swashbuckler, and in the sense of striving to escape the constraints of modern conventionality, in its vistas of untamed mountains and gaslit alleyways.

And, with that in mind, you could make a case that the real star of this movie is the confidently-realized Victorian setting, with its velvet brocade curtains and its opulent Pugin wallpapers, its tailcoated butlers and its gleaming silver teapots, and tigerskin rugs casually thrown over chairs, its unashamed empires and its Ruritanian forests; and if you think those details aren't the sort of thing that the audience should be noticing in a popcorn movie, then it's certainly the sort of thing that Sherlock Holmes would notice, especially this Holmes, and the sort of thing that will lodge in the average audience member's subconscious, to create a rich and compelling sense of place.

The action begins, of course, in London, in the full pomp of its Imperial confidence, with its polite dining rooms and raucous gambling dens, a city populated by English gentlemen and immigrants from the four corners of the British Empire; then the film moves by steam train and paddle steamer to Paris - in the days when you could still tell a man's nationality by the cut of his suit - and finds room to frame every single iconic Belle Epoque landmark on the skyline, subtly reminding the viewer that this was the age when the iconic cityscape was created; from there, the story moves to the anonymous wharves and factories and marshaling yards of a German industrial town, and finally to the inevitable climactic confrontation above a crashing waterfall in the Swiss Alps.

This is a world full of bright, bold characters, with its Romany encampments, Anarchist dens, Cossack assassins, and colourful uniforms everywhere. It's a little surprising to find that it's also a world with CPR and cosmetic surgery: while the details are light-heartedly anachronistic, a quick bit of research reveals that 1891, the year in which the film is set, has a genuine claim to be the year that both techniques went mainstream. Either the scriptwriters pulled those details out of some obscure list of things that happened in 1891, or they got very lucky indeed.

To my relief, this is also a sequel that eschews the fashionable fantasy elements that were present in its precursor. As to the array of weapons, which have attracted some comment online, I'll get on to them in a moment. The main point is that this is a vision of 1891, however stylized and excessive, that takes its cues from the unexpected and authentic reality.

It doesn't matter that there's no neo-medieval castle-hotel straddling the Reichenbach Falls in the real world, because the dramatic, anachronistic ambition of the architecture is just right for the end of the nineteenth century: designed to look like a grander re-imagining of something from an older and perhaps better age, designed so that the snow can swirl in through the carved cloister arches and the spray can leap up from the waterfall below. This is a setting that perfectly evokes the spirit and beauty and meaning of the world in which it's set - yes, meaning.

Because, in the crux of the plot, in the pivot of the mystery that Sherlock Holmes is chasing, the joy and glory of this lost past is being put up against the brutal industrial murder of the twentieth century.

In provincial Strasbourg, a quiet cathedral square is torn apart by the abrupt violence of a terrorist bomb; another atrocity ravages the dining room of a grand hotel; travelling gypsies find themselves stopped against the barbed-wire fences and uniformed guards of the modern state: yet this is a world where there are still open roads through the perfect forests and across the perfect mountains, and where there are still heroes, committed to defending all that's good in it. When one of those heroes describes the plot as a "threat to Western civilization", it's a cliché - yet, at the same time, fantastically, it actually means something in this movie.

And in the sequence where the real threat is revealed, those same heroes are put to flight by the indiscriminate violence of modern war: machine-guns, heavy artillery, and a scene of slaughter out of August 1914. It's the sort of action sequence that communicates a visceral impact to the audience, and there's no question that it's played for thrills - big guns are sexy, the film seems to say, as it fetishizes the mechanical process that it takes to fire one, and portrays the impact in stylized slow-motion; but it also displays in graphic detail the deadly reality of the threat that the heroes are fighting against.

In other words, this is a film that sets out to entertain the audience with set-piece action scenes, but in stark contrast to Underworld: Awakening, it somehow manages to use its own crowd-pleasing instincts to tell a fantastic story, too.

This is where the guns come in: the Mauser semi-automatic pistol is the perfect symbol of the devastating firepower that industrial technology can give to a half-trained man, and the point is made on-screen in a way that's not exactly subtle. True, history records that it was designed in 1893, but that's a forgivable anachronism, and within the frame of the movie, it's easy enough to imagine that the designers took a job in Oberndorf after the violent closure of the fictional Meinhart arms factory in nearby Heilbronn. In the real world, the comparable Borchardt seems to have been looking for a manufacturer in 1891, but perhaps the production team felt that this unusual weapon looked a little too sci-fi for the setting?

There's also a sub-machine-gun that shows up in one scene, but this is far less outrageous than it seems - it closely resembles the Madsen family of lightweight machine guns and automatic rifles from Denmark, prototyped in the 1880s and put into front-line use by 1896; the brass water-cooling jacket on the barrel looks more like it belongs on a Maxim gun, but that's certainly right for the period, and there are some references indicating that water-cooled variants of the Madsen existed, so even this may be authentic. Even if the exact combination of design details is unique to the movie, the concept and technology are just right.

In short, the unexpectedly modern firepower that shows up in this movie represents the real cutting edge of 1891. But, devastating as this rapid-fire barbarism is, naive as the hands that wield it might be, it's only part of a wider, more profoundly human threat: and it has, at the back and centre of it, the villainous intent of Professor James Moriarty.

Moriarty is a monster of unfettered sadism prowling behind the mask of a respectable society figure, channeling his aggression through the fashionable sport of boxing, espousing a mathematical nihilism that expresses contempt for the old order... but which really only serves to disguise and legitimize his real motivation - a twisted pleasure in the suffering of others; he's the perfect embodiment of modern villainy. In contrast with the BBC adaptation, this is a Moriarty who's clearly differentiated from Holmes - they're as different as a waltz and a machine-gun nest - and the film is none the worse for it.

In other words, this is a film that makes truly splendid use of its magnificent setting - not to comment on society, not to argue about right and wrong, but to make it the spring of the plot; it's the perfect example of "show, don't tell".

Another particularly classy detail was the use of music in this film - one terrorist bombing is choreographed to the climax of Mozart's Don Giovanni; a gruesome torture is set to Schubert'sTrout; and everyone dances a Strauss waltz where a Strauss waltz should be danced. There's also an extended borrowing from Ennio Morricone, which is used for comical effect, but makes a remarkably intelligent connection between the displaced outcasts of the older world that's under threat in this film and the socialist revolutionaries of the modern age - and I think I heard a bit of Wagner buried just where a bit of Wagner should be buried: the first notes of Siegfrieds Trauermarsch reverberate amid the harsh noise of mechanical battle as a German gun-crew fire the first awful salvo of industrial war: a leitmotiv that suggests the coming, inevitable Gotterdamerüng of World War I.

If, as some of the PR makes out, this was largely a movie that Guy Ritchie and and Robert Downey Jr. improvised during the filming process, then it's a spectacular triumph. And if what they did was strip an intelligent script down to the Maxim-gun essentials and amp up the Holywood colour, then it's no worse for that, either.

So, to sum up: this is a flawless, brilliant, wonderful film, gorgeous to look at and based around a plot that's driven by the fundamental tensions of human civilization - and that achieves it all with an easy, populist and effortless unpretentiousness. It may be the greatest popcorn movie ever made.

Yes, it really is that good. And if you can't see that, you need to push your inner Moriarty off a waterfall.

Random Movie Week #2: Underworld: Awakening

Another day, another movie, and today, it's Underworld: Awakening, the fourth in a series of vampire-vs.-werewolves popcorn movies. I enjoyed the first two of these, with their essentially sci-fi take on the monsters of Central European mythology, and their stylized setting - ruthlessly elegant vampires and grungy disgruntled werewolves, framed in the moody, anonymous modernity of cityscapes and wastelands, though I have to admit that I skipped on the third film, a critically-panned but reasonably profitable medieval prequel.

The biggest thing this series has going for it is Kate Beckinsale as the werwolf-hunting vampire Selene - she looks incredibly good in a rubber catsuit, whether she's crouching, fighting, putting on a coat, or being thrown into a wall - I suspect she'd also look good in that outfit if she was asked to fry an egg or replace a car exhaust, though sadly this film doesn't ask her to do those things; equally importantly, she can also put a good deal of emotion and poetry into her performance, even though she's unlikely to be taking this role terribly seriously - but then again, she married the man behind the series and became his muse, so you never know.

Either way, this is never going to be Shakespeare, but Beckinsale lifts this movie a long way past what it would be without her.

Alongside our heroine, there's top-drawer support from Charles Dance as a vampire nobleman, replacing Bill Nighy's Viktor from the previous movies - they've run out of flashbacks they can use him in, and I suspect he's too expensive these days. Dance brings nobility, dignity and paradoxical strength to the role of a character who's basically a coward or a quisling, without the overdose of theatrical absurdity (however appropriate it might be) that he's displayed in some of his previous roles. Like Beckinsale, he's a real pleasure to watch.

It's to these two actors' credit that they kept this movie interesting (and an honourable mention also goes to the underrated, untypecast Michael Ealy). Awakening retains the stylistic mood of its precursors, but it has an odd abstraction about it that I didn't notice before - the high-rise cityscape and references to the "feds" suggest America, but the film is set in a country with Russian attack helicopters, European cars, and foreign numberplates; certain details, like the old-model Volvos on the streets and the boxy computer monitors in the police station, even give the setting a slightly 1990s feel, which only adds to the sense of artificiality.

In fact, the stylization of the setting resembles a computer game, and the plot, such as it is, reinforces that impression: this movie is structured as a series of shoot-'em-up levels, in which our heroine uses her array of guns and blades and martial-arts moves to fight through cadres of generic dumb-mob NPCs - fascistic security guards; werewolves; more werwolves; and fascistic security guards who turn into werewolves: three of the four acts - or rather, levels - take place in the sort of moodily generic corridors-and-chambers settings you'd expect in a shooter, and they're paced by what are essentially cutscenes that push the plot along. The climactic action sequence eventually involves four protagonists fighting a mix of bosses and expendable NPCs, but perhaps the scriptwriters were playing Call of Duty the day they faxed that in.

It doesn't help that the unconvincing CGI on the werwolves would have been more in-keeping in a movie from the 1990s or a multiplayer gameplay sequence - and the cartoonish fate of exploding werwolves doesn't match the unflinchingly visceral way that some of the non-CGI characters are slaughtered earlier in the movie.

It doesn't help that the werwolf boss-character in his human form looks a lot like Chris Martin from Coldplay, either.

Awakening is also the first movie I've seen in 3D, and I have to admit that I wasn't impressed. Perhaps it's just my eyes or where I was sitting in the cinema, but fast-moving figures came over blurry, and the background often seemed distractingly prominent - and it was hard to see the point of any of it. True, 3D CGI can do attention-catching things with glass, smoke, air bubbles, bullets under water, but I suspect that I'd have enjoyed the movie more if I'd not had the distraction.

The emphasis on each individual visual sequence as a stylistic tableau might work in a computer game - the focus on specific 3D elements in each scene reminds me of the little bits of full animation in the cutscenes of ancient games like Myst and TIE FIghter - but a series of disparate and attention-seeking VFX tricks doesn't make for a coherent visual experience, and suggests that the film-makers either have a low opinion of the viewers' attention span, or a limited sense of storytelling coherence themselves.

To work as part of a joined-up visual narrative, 3D sequences would require a level of visual consistency and abstraction pushed far beyond the fetishized sci-fi baroque of this series - and that's saying a lot: it makes me think that the discipline involved is probably easier to obtain with anime or stylized CGI than live action.

In the final analysis, the 3D is disappointing and annoying, but not so much so that its failure takes over the film - it's simply something you have to work through in certain scenes; that's a conclusion that probably doesn't reflect terribly highly on the success of 3D technology, but it means the film survives it more-or-less intact.

So, overall, this is an okay film - the mediocre quality of certain aspects of the production doesn't sink it, and the central performances elevate it to the point at which it's actually worth watching. Given the strong box-office opening in the USA, a fifth instalment seems likely; let's hope they ditch the 3D cameras, revamp the CGI werewolves, and script some fight sequences that feel less like they were written for a generic XBox shooter.

After all, Kate Beckinsale kicking ass in a rubber catsuit, and acting rather well afterwards, is a winning combination.

Random Movie Week #1: Haywire

There are a lot of movies out right now that I want to see, so I've decided to take in a week of early-afternoon showings, thanks to a decent-sized cinema a short walk from the library where I'm currently doing some research.

If all goes to plan, I'll be watching (and reviewing) the Kate Beckinsale vampire sequel Underworld: Awakening, the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes pastiche Game of Shadows, Ralph Fiennes' Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, and just possibly Spielberg's War Horse - though not, sadly, the new George Lucas film Red Tails, which is having trouble finding a distributor. Apparently, the studios can't work out how to market a straightforward war film starring actors who co-starred in Jerry Maguire and Iron Man (hint: it's a straightforward war film, like Captain America or War Horse; is the studios' problem even worth dignifying with an explanation?).

Anyway, largely because it starts a little later than the other afternoon shows and I could push up the hill to catch it in time today, I began with Haywire... which I wanted to see largely on the basis of a kick-ass trailer showcasing a quality cast.

A woman walks into a snow-girt roadside diner in upstate New York; she's met by a guy with a gun under his puffer jacket who looks a little like Brad Pitt; when he attempts to get her to come not-so-quietly, she leaves him broken on the floor, and carjacks a hapless small-town geek who looks a little like Shia LaBeouf; as they speed away, she begins to explain the reason she's on the run.

It's a complicated explanation; the woman, endowed with the hard-boiled name Mallory Kane, is an ex-Marine working as a security "contractor" for various employers; her story involves a lot of A-list Holywood talent: her boss and ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), U.S. government intelligence hierarch Koblenz (Michael Douglas), his Spanish counterpart Rodriguez (Antonio Banderas), and Anglo-Irish hitman Paul (Michael Fassbender). For the next two hours, we follow her recounting her betrayal, escaping her pursuers, and getting revenge on the people who sold her out.

Overall, this film has a lot going for it, but there are two comments that need to qualify that statement: firstly, it's not the frenetically-paced rally of fast-cut action and sharp twists that the trailer would suggest - it's something altogether more classy and considered; but at the same time, it's let down a little for me by a slightly flat third act and an abrupt climax.

Mallory Kane is played by a female martial-arts champion named Gina Carano, who I'd never heard of before the trailer; I'm not sure she's ever going to play a Shakespeare villainess, but she's used with very good effect in this movie, being required to fight, move, make professional preparations for her next mission, and engage in the sort of shallow small-talk that everyone involved knows is fake. In one of the best of many good scenes, she winds down between hits with a glass of red wine and some cleaning of her pistols.

Carano's casting suits the mood of the film, with its unblinking lens taking in a cynical, commercialized world where everything is for sale and taking a life costs nothing, all concealed under the outward veneer of fashionable consumerism and professional business-speak. When Mallory and Paul are impersonating a couple, their thoroughly professional interaction echoes the familiar rhythms of a "successful" relationship, right down to the unromantic physicality of the fight that follows their evening out. Even the title is a meaningless piece of branding, chosen purely for marketing purposes.

But, on the other hand, Mallory's motivation for turning on her bosses isn't outrage or emotional angst - it's that old-fashioned, unfashionable sense of patriotism and duty that you'd expect of a U.S. Marine, allied perhaps to some finely-honed kill-or-be-killed instincts. She could be John Wayne's daughter. Not that this film would do anything so crude as to make any of that explicit. It's left to sneak up on you as you think it through.

This isn't a particularly deep film, but it's a well-realized and superior action movie, one that takes its own limitations and does something interesting and satisfying with them.

That ability to make things interesting extends to the camerawork. There's some very nice use of colour and tone and composition - yellow highlights in an apartment decorated in muted monochrome, or the way that the fugitive heroine's leather jacket and grey knit hat become camouflage against the urban roofscape of red brick and vent ducting. These stylized visuals are used to define a sense of place, with shifts between them marking the passage of time, and thus they give visual structure to the narrative - contrasting with another aspect of the cinematography, the way the screen frames printed words, architectural space and human movement to develop a silent subtext about sexuality, violence, internationalization and consumerism.

This is also a film that isn't afraid to use long cuts, especially for the fight sequences. One thing that didn't work so well was the intrusive, insistent music, which I suspected was imposed by the studio to jazz up a film they didn't quite understand, but which turns out to be from the director's regular collaborator - so it must be designed to lay a deliberate dissonance over the well-composed visuals.

I was surprised, after writing the bulk of the review, to find that the director was Stephen Sondebergh, his name concealed - perhaps deliberately - in the blink immediately after the final hard cut; his anonymous-sounding cinematographer and editor are his own pseudonyms; that explains the quality of the visual composition, and the integrity of the aesthetic choices, and for once, it makes me think I'm not making it up when I see a lot of depth in what I'm watching.

The plot, too, is satisfying, intricate without being too complicated - as Mallory recounts the backstory, she gets her hostage to recite back names and details to her, to make sure the audience remembers them; it's hard to know if this is simply functional storytelling, or a deliberately postmodern trick, but it's effective regardless. There's also a rather satisfying ambiguity about the storyline, since it's unclear whether Mallory really gets her revenge, or whether she's simply manipulated into becoming a full-time assassin for the top bad guy.

So, this is a good film, but it's let down by the ending, which failed to add anything to what had come before, and thus failed to keep building up the pace.

This problem first appears in the lead-in to Act III, in which a chase sequence that fails to build enough tension is ended by a left-field twist so bizarre that I burst out laughing. I'm not sure if the jarring absurdity is deliberate or not. The main action of the third act was functional, very nicely shot in night-time greys overlaid by shadows, and in the concluding scenes, clear skies, stone backdrops and crisp lighting served to weave disparate elements of plot and place into an outwardly satisfying narrative; but for all that skill, the finale didn't provide any emotional payoff, and nor did it resolve anything physically or aesthetically, eschewing the impact of a final punch to the face - though that fits right in with the heroine's motivations and the ambiguity of the plotline, and I suspect it may even be a lead-in for a projected sequel.

And if that's the case, I don't think it's a bad thing at all.