Blame it on Russell James. It’s all his fault. After all, as one of the new wave Brit Noir hardboilers from the mean streets of Cheltenham his shoulders are broad. In Mike Stotter’s quarterly crime fiction review, Shots, Russell referred to my attack, published in the previous issue, on the James Ellroy novel and the movie based upon it, LA Confidential, as ‘the John Foster diatribe.’ When the opportunity came up to write this column, the phrase seemed uniquely appropriate for the title of a monthly review which takes as its stance a critical and even sceptical view of contemporary film and television, particularly in the light of the forthcoming technological changes which will spawn multifarious channels and see the traditional terrestrial four even further reduced in veracity. In these conformist times, when everyone is so on-message, this will be very much a review column, dedicated to an opinionated outlook on media crime.

Diatribe is preoccupied with tv and film crime fiction, although it might also glance occasionally at crime-orientated nonfiction material if the channel controllers get over their current obsession with the documentary as fly-on-the-wall soap, the latest of which is Granada’s numbingly facile Motorway Life, an unintentional critique of the M6’s boneheaded motorway police. It is particularly depressing that this programme should come from Granada, in many ways the home of the television documentary, a company which in the past has commissioned the work of documentary luminaries such as Dennis Mitchell, Norman Swallow and Leslie Woodhead. Granada has always been the most creative and courageous of the ITV federal ensemble of programme companies, indeed ITV’s flagship and the one company in Commercial Television most like the BBC in its willingness to take risks. And, like the BBC, Granada is now dumbing down with the rest of the boys.

The column will consider the current television output, some of the latest movie releases in cinema and on video, and cover relevant book and other publications concerned with crime fiction in the media. Since there is a widespread view that television and film are no longer worth writing for, unless you need the money, are they therefore worth writing about? The decline in the standards in both mediums will be obvious to anyone who has been watching for a decade or more. Television seems universally infested with that irritating Big Breakfast cheerleading sycophancy, where everyone is very loud and very cheerful and having a lot of fun all of the time. Hollywood now suffers from such a paucity of new ideas that it is increasingly reliant on the remakes of established masterpieces, of which it will produce inferior versions. The new Psycho is in the pipeline, and Rear Window is soon to follow.

Both television and cinema have become increasingly out of touch with their audiences. Television drama used to be at the forefront of new wave crime drama with series such as Z-Cars, Big Breadwinner Hog, Gangsters, The Sweeney, Law and Order, The Bill, Between the Lines, et al. Whilst there is hope with the new Tony Garnett (Cathy Come Home, Between the Lines, This Life) BBC production, The Cops, yet to be aired, it is still yet another cop show. Whilst it is true that television has dramatised Mark Timlin and John Harvey, with an especially excellent production of Harvey’s Lonely Hearts, the medium appears to be in ignorance of the British hardboiled movement and the realist achievements of novelists such as Ian Rankin and Nicholas Blincoe. The term ‘cutting edge’ has now become such a cliché, but the BBC in particular seems keen to adopt the blunting edge of Sunday night country cosies or half-baked psychological thrillers. Television crime fiction is, at present, remorselessly bourgeoisie and whodunit orientated, with ITV’s Midsomer Murders being the nadir of recent small screen crime offerings, in which characters, whatever their station in life, always seem to own extremely spacious and well appointed homes. Even a rookie wpc in a recent episode of The Bill possessed a surprisingly large flat, even for a graduate recruit. Middle class television designers obviously assume that the rest of the population live in the same palatial splendour as they do, and have doubtless been busy measuring up for the production of the BBC’s The Echo, from Minette Walters’s novel which, following The Sculptress, The Ice House, The Scold’s Bride, is to be screened in a few months, starring ex-Nick Sharman star Cliff Owen.

So why bother reviewing television and film at all? They are, of course, important mediums with enormous influence. Channel Controllers, unknown to the general public and unelected by them, have tremendous power and by its use can forge the psyche of the nation. Their decision-making concerning scheduling and the quality of their programming should be challenged and if necessary criticised, especially given current concerns about programme standards. And, despite the overall depressing outlook, there are pluses and even some excitements. Hollywood still makes the occasional good movie and the renaissance in British cinema, despite distribution difficulties - which means many of these movies will end up on television - has produced a number of Trainspotting type innovative low budget films, especially in the thriller, from Shallow Grave onwards. Guy Richie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, to be reviewed in October’s Diatribe, is the latest movie to give us a rougher edge than television at present seems able. In America, the Coen Brothers are still making movies and there are enough national cinemas, such as France’s, dedicated to the cause of melodrama - in their case Simenonesqe psychological thrillers, our old friend film noir and the French gangster movie.

As for television, one or two diversions are promised. Because of its faster turnaround, television finds it difficult to generate original material in such a demanding form as the thriller, thus its dependence upon source material. Although Martina Cole is perhaps not regarded as the most notable of the new breed of Brit Noir novelists, she is certainly not cosy and therefore dramatisation of her work is a welcome variation on our screens. Linda La Plante, despite her totally risible computer thriller series earlier in the summer, began her television writing career with the powerful Widows from Euston Films, one of the memorably toughest of crime series, if not as feminist as she would claim. Both writers have new tv mini-series starting at the beginning of September. Cole’s first tv excursion since Dangerous Lady, again made by the production company Warner Sisters, The Jump, dramatised from her novel by Adrian Hodges, and La Plante’s Supply and Demand, will be reviewed in October’s Diatribe together with two new Dalziel and Pascoe adaptations from the BBC, based on the Reginald Hill novels Bones and Silence and The Wood Beyond.

Perhaps, then, it was a mistake to begin this column at the dog-end of the Silly Season, when television has little to offer but summer repeats and reruns of old movies, and the multiplexes themselves are replete with moronic special effects blockbusters. Where original material is concerned, television tends to put out the turkeys in the summer when it hopes nobody will be watching. However, a little noticed event occurred during July which provided a painful reminder of the ephemerality of television and helps contextualise the debate about quality in popular programming. John Hopkins, the playwright and screenwriter, died in California. Hopkins was one of the sixties generation of young BBC turks who helped rejuvenate Auntie during the ‘Greene Spring’ of Sir Hugh Greene’s controversial Director-Generalship. Few will have heard of Hopkins nowadays, but during the sixties and seventies he was a deeply influential television writer on a par with Dennis Potter. Part of Hopkins’s prolific output was Talking to a Stranger, four ninety minute plays for the newly established BBC2, starring Judi Dench and directed by Christopher Morahan, which was described by George Melly in the Observer as ‘the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television.’ Despite a long-awaited repeat a few years ago, it is doubtful if many people from younger generations have seen or even heard of this now ‘lost’ masterpiece.

Yet Hopkins’s real breakthrough was in the domain of popular weekly episodic television and especially the police series. He began his career as a producer on Mrs Dale’s Diary, then went into television as a BBC writer-adaptor, following in the footsteps of famed Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, and provided dramatisations of Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room and Margery Allingham’s 1937 mystery Dancers in Mourning. He wrote an original six-part police thriller, A Chance of Thunder, before joining Z-Cars, which had begun transmission to huge controversy in 1961. Hopkins was script editor and lead-writer, scripting over fifty episodes in two years before he left the BBC to write movies, one of which was the James Bond film, Thunderball. Another notable screenplay which he authored was The Offence, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery as a deranged police detective, based upon Hopkins’s stage play, This Story of Yours, which was presented at the Royal Court in 1968.

There can be few writers whose work impacted so widely and permanently in the language of television drama. Hopkins understood very acutely the rhythms of television and wrote intensely visual scripts containing short, pacy scenes and brisk, terse dialogue. He caught the actuality idiom of television and forged a grammar which freed-up the moribund studio series which preceded Z-Cars. Some of the episodes Hopkins wrote – such as Affray, Policework, Person Unknown - were amongst the toughest and uncompromising made in a series notorious for its contentious insistence upon social realism. Today the series has assumed classic status, but it is unlikely that it would have done so without Hopkins’s major commitment and contribution.

Hopkins changed the way scripts were written, an inheritance seen daily in episodes of EastEnders and The Bill, but he also made it possible for popular serious to be taken seriously, to be regarded as serious commentary upon society. Previously, weekly series had been regarded purely as rather inferior escapism, visual chewing-gum. The major achievement of Z-Cars was to enable the series writer to also be a serious writer, engaging with thematic material, and it is questionable if that would have been possible without the stamina of Hopkins’s endeavours in writing so many episodes of such verisimilitude. 

How did the BBC pay tribute to this distinguished but now largely forgotten writer? It repeated a Hopkins’s Z-Cars episode late at night on BBC2, prefaced with a five-minute introduction by actor Brian Blessed, who played the character Fancy Smith in the original series. The repeated episode was not one of the best Hopkins wrote and Blessed’s introduction was toe-curlingly theatrical, more concerned with satisfying the ego of the thespian than providing any hard information about Hopkins, who certainly deserved a better memorial than this. Even though the repeated episode, concerning pornography, was not vintage Hopkins, it pointed up the force and skill of the scriptwriting which is so lacking in today’s series, most notably in the long-running ITV policier and heir of Z-Cars, The Bill, beset as it is with falling rating and the threat of cancellation if its performance does not improve.

When Bill creator Geoff McQueen’s original one-hour series was turned into a twice-weekly by executive producer Peter Cregeen, The Bill sustained strong writing, acting and production values, refusing to turn the series into a soap and courageously insisting upon stories being self-contained within the twenty-five minute structure of each episode. This was difficult to maintain, since it was like producing two one-off dramas a week, week in week out, and there isn’t that much writing talent around. Soaps with ongoing storylines are more easily written and produced, but less original and creative and The Bill managed quite a high standard of work for a long time, inviting in different authors to contribute individual episodes. But in the last year or so complacency has crept into the production of this once ratings winner and the programme has really slipped, transmitting some truly appalling episodes in the last few months. In an attempt to salvage the programme, The Bill has jazzed up its format and introduced serial storylines into the show, which is gradually nudging its way back to the one-hour format.

This has produced a decided improvement, but The Bill has a long way to go to match the best of the already established one-hour and feature-length cops shows, notably A Touch of Frost, a format created from the books of R D Wingfield, but in scripts developed by television writers from their own concepts. The Bill’s first venture into longer episodes was a feature-length script by Elizabeth Ann-Wheal, which was so structurally fragmented that it resembled three short episodes glued together and too obviously soaped character relationships into the potential of storylines with ‘legs.’ The result was bitty and somewhat dull with a stereotyped and predictable story gambit involving drugs and a police decoy in the form of WPC Rosie Fox, inventively and quite movingly played with a neurotic energy by guest actress Caroline Catz. An interesting and highly charged narrative concerning the sexual harassment of WPC Fox developed over the next three one-hour episodes, building into a gripping fourth episode, with the deviously unstable PC Santini, played with compelling narcissistic cool by Michael Higgs, prosecuting an almost successful attempt to undo the unwilling object of his affections. This narrative strand worked particularly well, since it properly involved all of the regulars and questioned their individual positions in a story concerning persecution and prejudice. The supporting storylines neatly underwrote the main dramatic drive and The Bill’s storytelling rule that the exclusivity of the police viewpoint must consistently prevail did not inhibit a narrative involving working relationships and the mores of the police community.

Despite this success, A Touch of Frost, repeated this summer on ITV, remains unbeatable. This series of ‘feature length’ dramas founded its dramatic approach upon the depth and complexity of characterisation in its lead protagonist, Inspector Frost himself. On this level, The Bill still remains quite superficial, even though A Touch of Frost has been written by some former Bill scripters, and scripted edited by Tim Vaughan, a brilliant editor from the heyday of The Bill. A Touch of Frost is by far the best cop show on television and its return to our screens is eagerly awaited. Once the idea of the star of Only Fools and Horses playing the serious if unsolemn Frost was absorbed and accepted, it was possible to see past the sitcom façade and appreciate what a completely masterly – and underrated – actor David Jason is. The power of the show lies in its modesty, its unfussiness, its simple insistence upon telling a good story with a strong thematic undercurrent. No squealing tyres, no exploding heads. It follows the principal established by Z-Cars of telling stories about ordinary people in commonplace – if often tragic – situations. Frost is a flawed character, with his faultlines quite visible, and the actor’s performance allows us to see into his mind simply through his grimacing mannerisms. And A Touch of Frost has a lot of humour in it, an element missing from many cop shows, including Wycliffe, which also enjoyed a run of repeats on ITV this summer.

Again the Wycliffe format was evolved from a series of novels, in this instance those written by W J Burley. The first series was actually based upon Burley’s books, but they didn’t adapt well according to the producers, which means they were badly adapted from first class material. Original scripts were then commissioned from television writers but, despite its evocative Cornish setting and a good performance from Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe, the series was weakly produced and scripted, with the smack of routine, conveyor-belt weekly tv series. Unlike Frost, Wycliffe is a depthless and dull lead character, not someone you would turn on by choice to watch.

How many weekly series transfer well to the big screen and vice versa? The demands of the two mediums and their audience expectations are so different that relocation to another context usually makes them feel false. Very few tv-series have spun off from movies. Famously there is Ted Willis’s Dixon of Dock Green derived from Basil Deardon’s The Blue Lamp, and the US series M*A*S*H from the Robert Altman movie. More movies have been made based on tv series, however, usually unsuccessfully. Despite all the A-list talent on board for the making of The Untouchables, including Brian De Palma directing and David Mamet scripting, the movie wasn’t a patch on the original tv series for sheer streetwise verve. Likewise The Fugitive, which in the cinema became a very tame Harrison Ford vehicle. Neither of the two Sweeney movies have the edge of the original tv film series. Bottom of list comes Jeremiah Chechik’s The Avengers, slipped out between the summer’s mega-budget movies without a preview screening. The producers were right to fear the worst, their main problem being a lack of understanding from screenwriter Don MacPherson (Absolute Beginners, The Big Man) as to what The Avengers was really about.

The television series of The Avengers began transmission in 1961, the same year as Z-Cars. It was a spin-off from a 1960 ITV series called Police Surgeon, starring Ian Hendry in a piece of straight tv melodrama. The subsequent development of the programme expresses the cultural schizophrenia in popular television drama at that time - between the social realists, producing such series as Z-Cars, Maigret, Troubleshooters, and what one might call the fantasy escapists, represented by Doctor Who, Adam Adamant and The Avengers. The fantasy escapists were a reflection of Swinging London, the burgeoning Satire Boom and James Bond, their wryness a reaction against the intensity of the social realists and the era, since the late fifties, of the Angry Young Man. Such series were very camp and very British, insisting that you shouldn’t take life too seriously, dealing in sado-masochistic style and an innate suspicion of authority and Big Brother stratagems as later manifested in Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 The Prisoner. Although The Avengers was fun and sustained an enjoyable lightness of touch, it was also astutely enigmatic and coded, presenting a laconically ruthless image of realpolitik in the Britain of the Cold War.

The people responsible for the 1998 movie are clueless as to the elements which made the tv series so beguiling. It isn’t Ralph Fiennes' fault that he is not Patrick Macnee, who jokily plays Invisible Jones in the current film, nor Uma Thurman’s that she is neither Honor Blackman nor Diana Rigg. More than a reprise of The Avengers, this is a simple-minded pastiche of the James Bond films and Sean Connery makes his archetypal scene-stealing guest-star appearance. Even his performance is hammy and shamelessly bad. Co-credited with the screenplay is Sidney Newman, the original creator of The Avengers and Doctor Who, and a seminal figure in British television drama, who died of a heart attack in 1997. A Canadian, Newman was brought in to shake up Armchair Theatre, the ABC Television – later Thames – prestigious Sunday night drama slot. Up until then, the late fifties, most one-off tv drama consisted of adaptations, but Newman instigated a policy of commissioning new work from often new writers. Later Newman was appointed Head of Drama at the BBC, and steered the BBC drama department through its most controversial and dynamic period, especially in its seasons of The Wednesday Play, with dramas such as Cathy Come Home. It’s difficult to believe now, but one-off television dramas were then so combative that they used to make front-page news. If Sydney Newman applied for a job at the BBC today, would they employ him?

Those were interesting times, by no means as liberated as they seem now through rose-tinted memories. The very welcome publication of Leo Marks’s screenplay Peeping Tom (Faber and Faber, £8.99) is a reminder that the release of the movie in 1960, six months before Psycho, destroyed the career of the illustrious Michael Powell, such was the level of critical and industry hostility to the film. Even some members of the cast disowned it in the McCarthyist atmosphere which engulfed the movie and Michael Powell never worked again. The sixties were a time when new ideas were breaking through and in 1960 the French New Wave had been one year down the line, but the level of tolerance for radical expression, especially if it was to do with sex, was still quite limited in this country. Even the liberally-minded film critic Dilys Powell disowned the movie at the time, later to recant, her 1994 contrition being reproduced in the introduction to the screenplay.

The Faber edition of the screenplay provides an intriguing interview of Marks by Chris Rodley on the inspiration for Peeping Tom as being found during Marks’s time as a member of the Second World War British intelligence community, also the theme of last year’s Channel Four Arthouse documentary on Peeping Tom, A Very British Psycho, which preceded a screening of the movie. The screenplay is highly literate, written in a brusque, low key style, properly minimalist in dialogue and stage directions, yet, surprisingly – especially given who was to direct it – Marks breaks a cardinal screenwriting rule by including camera directions, although they are quite sparse. However enjoyable and stimulating, the screenplay does not prepare you for Powell’s deeply disturbing movie, and one does feel it to be Powell’s film, despite Marks’s considerable contribution.

Martin Scorsese was largely instrumental in ensuring the restoration of the surviving prints of Peeping Tom and securing its reputation with modern day audiences. With Psycho, the departure from the bland, small ‘c’ conservative ethos of a Hitchcock film was quite violent: the chubby reassurance of the Hitchcock élan was suddenly severed. The film almost spat at its audience with its harsh black-and-white cinematography - which was like the blacks and greys of newsprint - the screaming violins of its score, the edgy continental panache of its visual style, and a story which screamed from the dark side of the street in the encroaching age of the serial killer. Psycho didn’t seem like a Hitchcock movie, but a young man’s film, its energy, dexterity and lack of smoothness belonging to the rawness of cinematic new waves which were occurring all over the world – including America, with John Cassavetes’s debut Shadows in 1959.
 
Peeping Tom is different. It looks deceptively like a stagy old British horror movie, something from Hammer Films, with its garishly vulgar Eastman Colour and mildly dated acting style. But it is the subject matter seething under the innocent-seeming surface which makes this one of the most audaciously subversive movies ever made, with the lead protagonist filming his own murders, which are viewed by the cinemagoer through the viewfinder of the actual cinema screen, so that the audience for the film is linked to the voyeurism and symbolically implicated in the murders. Some critics have described the film as a comment on cinema itself, but this seems a limiting perspective. Powell’s film is an essay in the nature of voyeurism and the personality of the voyeur, but it is also saying: the camera can kill you. The graven tyranny of the camera as a destroyer and a catalyst for violence has been witnessed over and over in the almost forty years since the film was released to such acrimony.

Both Psycho and Peeping Tom also radically altered our perception of the killer, so that now the idea of a serial killer being the quiet little guy next door has become a truism. But in 1960 murderers had two heads, bad breath, walked with a limp, and had a patch over one eye. However disturbed, both Norman Bates and Mark Lewis are shy, self-effacing, retiring young men. Their gentle ordinariness is much more in keeping with our knowledge of the actual rather than fictional personalities of killers, who are not monsters but terrifyingly commonplace, people just like you or me. Two video releases this month underline the idea of killers possessing unexceptional characters and each film in its own way is quietly dissident of received ideas and opinions. Based on the psychological thriller novel The Gold Egg by Tim Grabbé, who also co-wrote the screenplay with its director, The Vanishing (Nouveaux Pictures, £15.99) is the reissue on video of the arthouse and student circuit cult movie, directed by George Sluizer and released to wide acclaim in 1988. Sluizer remade The Vanishing for Hollywood and filthy lucre in 1993, starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock, but it was a disaster - both pretentious and lacking in credibility, with the usually excellent Jeff Bridges absurd as the sociopath at the centre of the story. Compared with the original Dutch version, it is like watching two different films, and the cop-out ending of the remake undermined the remorseless pessimism which informed the original.

The Vanishing, which involves the kidnap and murder of the lead protagonist’s girlfriend, is almost entirely free of violence. What little there is so realistic - clumsy, ill-timed, comical and lifelike – that it horrifies by its fidelity to real experience. The film bears out the old adage that evil is more interesting than goodness or honour, the most engaging and fascinating character in the film being the killer Raymond, a sociopath played with stainless-steel cool by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu. Whilst Sluizer’s thriller is certainly Hitchcockian in tone and the influence is clearly there, the movie is so drained of melodrama, so truthful of its characters and their responses, so utterly believable, that it provides an urgent anxiety in the audience through its almost documentary precision in observing people, places and events. The picture also sustains some extraordinary moments of humour in the blackest of circumstances and presents us with a killer whose prosaic lifestyle does not impede his charm and humour. Raymond is amusing, likeable and fascinating, the very qualities which make him dangerous.

River’s Edge (4 Front Video, £5.99), directed by Tim Hunter, released in 1986, written by Neal Jimenez from a true story, might be described as a ‘killer kid’ movie, of which there is a definite film genre, the most obvious example of which is Lord of the Flies, from the famous novel by William Golding. The novel, which describes the fall of man, no less, projected through children, was hauntingly filmed by Peter Brook in 1963 and, less effectively, by Harry Hook in 1990. Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge postulates the idea that the inherent fascism and cruelty in people can be unleashed with particular force in the young, who are often unable to feel much remorse for their deeds given the callowness of their emotions. Children and young people possess an uncharted evil and deploy it without the restraint associated with maturity. Despite the shrugged indifference to the violence in their midst, Hunter’s characters are not unique to this age, nor is his film yet another animated lecture about drugs and hippiedom. Romantically attractive as it is to speak of the ‘lost generation,’ every teenage generation is and has been lost and usually describes itself in terms of such self-pityingly narcissism.

An obvious forerunner of this movie is Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 The Bad Seed, from Maxwell Anderson’s play, remade for American television in 1985, a drama about a sociopathic schoolgirl who murders. Teenage anarchy and sociopathy in the young is also to be found in Hitchcock’s Rope and Tom Kalin’s Swoon, both based on the celebrated – why do we always describe famous murder cases as ‘celebrated’? – experimental child murder by homosexual lovers Loeb and Leopold. If J D Salinger’s renowned novel The Catcher in the Rye is the definitive portrait of disaffected youth, cinema has often opted for more violent interpretations: notably Terrence Malick’s masterpiece, Badlands, Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Nick Roeg’s Performance. When film noir abandoned the neon-lit city and went on the road with Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, a whole genre of young-couple-on-the-run movies emerged with such films as Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night and Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy, anticipating more sophisticated treatment of the youthful murder spree in Malick’s Badlands, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Leonard Kastle’s oddball but inspired The Honeymoon Killers. But River’s Edge true forebears are Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause, Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, George Stevens's Giant, and the James Dean cycle of ‘First American Teenager’ angst operas. 

River’s Edge sustains a particularly potent soundtrack and very little incident in its one hundred minutes. Like The Vanishing, its strength lies in the banality of its characters and events, following the murder of a young woman whose naked body is discovered on a river bank: the bulk of the film is concerned with the consequences of a post-shadowed violence we do not witness. Director Hunter was originally a screenwriter and scripted Jonathan Kaplan’s 1979 movie Over The Edge. He made two previous youth-orientated movies prior to River’s Edge – Tex, 1982 and Sylvestor, 1985. He went on to make Lies of the Twins, 1991, The Saint of Fort Washington, 1993 and several episodes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which bears certain similarities to River’s Edge, and also features Dennis Hopper in his familiar hippie, druggie role. A few years earlier, in 1980, Hopper made Out of the Blue, which blamed violently disaffected youth on hippie parents. Yet, while Hopper’s excesses served Lynch well in Blue Velvet, his overripe and over-indulged performance is the main flaw of River’s Edge and becomes strongly exposed against naturalistic performances from Keanu Reeves and particularly Crispin Glover as the group of smalltown teenagers’ hapless ringleader.

The vapid debate at the centre of River’s Edge amongst the young protagonists is whether to turn in the woman’s killer, who is one of their number. The film disconcerts because it does not moralise nor judge. In refusing to preach, River’s Edge provides a powerful account of middle American youth, who come to symbolise the malaise of the whole of society. Offering an image of startling callousness in the protagonists’ casually blithe attitude towards murder, especially of someone they all knew, the movie avoids sensationalism, is often blackly comic and, adopting the stance of Badlands, keeps its distance from the characters and their largely uneventful story, remaining nonjudgemental, leaving the issues it raises in the audience’s lap. Seeped in nihilism, melancholy and an air of pointlessness, River’s Edge is not escapism. Like The Vanishing, this is a thriller which provokes and asks questions on the assumption that asking questions is a sign of life and that film-making is a serious business. Both videos are highly recommended because these movies insist that, whether thriller melodrama or not, they should have something to say and embrace a distinct social purpose.

Any comments about John's column  - mailto:geoff@twbooks.co.uk