Reading and Viewing

What have I been reading and watching over the Christmas period? Apart from the Peter Mandelson book which I wrote about last week, I have read the latest Lee Child which is up to his usual standard. It really carries on from 61 Hours and pits Reacher against the Italian, Arab and Iranian mafia, half a dozen American football players and a family of people traffickers. Guess who wins?

I have also started a new Minette Walters, Dorset's own writer of psychological thrillers.

Continuing our viewing of old films, we have watched two Humphrey Bogart movies, The Left Hand of God and Sirocco. In the former Bogart apparently plays an RC priest who arrives at a mission station to take up his role there. Gene Tierney plays the love interest, though what is a priest doing falling for a young girl? And what is his relationship with Lee J Cobb, the local Chinese warlord. Is he really a priest?

In Sirocco Bogart plays an American gun-runner, selling weapons to the Syrians in their uprising against the pre-war French. Lee J Cobb (again) plays the French Intelligence Officer who is hunting him. Unusual for him at this late stage in his career, Bogart plays a baddie, though will he have a self-sacrificing core to his character? What do you think?

We have also watched A Letter to Three Wives which starred Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell and Ann Sothern as three wives who receive a letter from the local beauty telling them that she has run off with one of their husbands. One of the husbands is played by Kirk Douglas (a pedant after my own heart) but the movie is stolen by a young(-ish) Thelma Ritter.

WE are also making our way through One Foot in the Grave. Last night we watched the 1995 Christmas Special. My sides were aching with laughter.