DEADLIER THAN THE MALE?

Quite by accident the two films I watched over the weekend both dealt with real-life women whose names have becomes infamous.

I finally caught up with Channel 4/HBO's LONGFORD starring Jim Broadbent as the eponymous Lord and Samantha Morton as Myra Hindley. I remember back in the early '70s the furore when it was revealed that after years of prison visits, Lord Longford was pressing for the chance of parole for Hindley, mainly I think because it was the first time I had heard what The Moors Murderers had actually done. I also remember Longford appearing on the current affairs programme Brass Tacks with the mother of Lesley Ann Downey which certainly made for gripping tv - they have even included it in the film with Broadbent as Longford cleverly spliced into the real broadcast.










It's a natural for screenwriter Peter Morgan who is making a speciality of scripts which feature confrontations between real-life characters - David Frost & Richard Nixon, Tony Blair & The Queen, Tony Blair & Gordon Brown - but the film could have done with maybe a more insightful director than Tom Hooper as it's pace eventually seemed a bit plodding. Longford was also painted whiter than white - his recorded homophobia could easily have been brought in to the few scenes showing his anti-pornography campaign.










What made the film watchable were the excellent performances - Jim Broadbent was superb as Longford, it's hard to think of another actor who could have made his strange, old-fashioned, demeanor sympathetic. He was matched by a fascinating performance by Samantha Morton - not an actress I usually care for - as Myra. Like Longford you are thrown at her first appearance in a prison visiting room, not the blonde from the famous police photo but a dark-haired mousy woman hunched over a corner table. Her watchfulness broken only by occasional shots of impatience she makes a convincingly supplicant trying hard to atone.

These scenes of intellectual seduction are shattered when Longford receives a letter from Ian Brady, played in a malevolently evil performance by Andy Serkis. In three short scenes Serkis revels in his role, toying with Longford each time until he delivers news of Myra's duplicitous nature. It is after the last of these scenes - when Brady announces that he will talk to the police about the two missing victims - that Morton has her best scene. After letting Longford prattle on Myra interrupts him to tell him she too will admit to the killings and that a new lawyer has advised her to drop Longford like a hot potato. Morton's cold reading of the scene is perfectly matched by Broadbent's utter devastation. An invented scene of them meeting again a year before their deaths is unnecessary, giving the film a neat button that it really doesn't need. If you haven't seen it though I recommend it for the three excellent central performances.

My other femme fatale was in the 1931 MGM film of MATA HARI starring Greta Garbo.

Although 89 minutes it's hard to sit through now without wincing. Although Garbo is never less than watchable, several times she appears to be in a silent film, her responses are so broad. Amazingly it was one of her most successful films. This despite a clunky script, a truly bizarre storyline and now laughable performances by co-stars Ramon Navarro - playing a Russian in his thick Mexican accent - and Lionel Barrymore chewing the expensive scenery. It's odd that despite two silent films and later ones starring Jeanne Moreau and Sylvia Kristel no one has yet taken the plunge and made a film of the real story behind Mata Hari.

Margaretha Zelle was born in the Netherlands and at 18 she married a naval officer who was then posted to Java where Margarethe bore a boy and girl. In the first bizarre twist in her life the son was poisoned by an ex-employee. Divorced a few years after and back in Europe she moved to Paris working as a circus act, an artist's model and finally becoming an 'exotic' dancer under the Javanese name Mata Hari claiming to be an Eastern princess. She was soon the talk of Paris and naturally took the next step in becoming a courtesan of men in high places. When WWI broke out, being neutral Dutch, she was able to pass easily over borders which eventually aroused suspicion. When interviewed by British military intelligence when travelling via London she informed them she was employed by their French counterparts, which the French vigorously denied. No firm evidence has ever been found to say she was or she wasn't so perhaps she was simply embroidering the truth as she had done before.

In 1917 a coded message was sent from the German army in Spain to Berlin commenting on the success of a French double agent named H-21. The code - which the Germans knew had been cracked by the French - also pointed to the identity being Mata Hari. A month later she was arrested in Paris and put on trial at a time of great demoralisation about the progress of the war and the huge death toll of troops. Again no lasting proof has ever been found as to her guilt but she was found guilty and shot in October of the same year aged 41. So was she the deadly spy of legend, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of soldiers or a fantasist over her head in dangerous times, tried as much for her sexual mores as for any alleged treason?

What I do know was her real life is a damn sight more interesting than the one cobbled together for Garbo - exotic mantrap spying for both the Russians and Germans falls in love with a young Russian pilot, shoots her Russian spymaster as he is about to indict her lover as a traitor and is arrested for his murder. Her lover is blinded in a plane crash, she is sentenced to be executed for treason, but not before being visited in the condemned cell by her blinded Russian who is led to believe he is visiting her in a hospital where she is about to go and have surgery!! She goes to her death smiling at finally having known true love.

Believe me there are times one should be grateful they don't make them like that anymore!