Red Joan

Red Joan is a wartime spy drama directed by Trevor Nunn based on, but in the end baring little relation to, the story of Melita Norwood who was unmasked as a former Soviet spy in 1999.

Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is living in quiet retirement in English suburbia and tending her garden when the police roll up to accuse her of treason. Her friends, neighbours and even her own son Nick (Ben Miles), a successful lawyer, have absolutely no idea about her dubious past. Nick thought she’d been a librarian. 

Dench plays her role admirably, as ever, but her Joan doesn't feature hugely and it is the younger version of Joan (Sophie Cookson) whose job it is to flesh out the story. This is done via flashbacks, as the older Joan digs reluctantly into her memory banks while under police interrogation.

Joan was an impressionable undergraduate at Cambridge University in the late 1930s when her conversion to the Communist cause began when an intruder appears at the window of her student flat one evening. This is Sonya (Tereza Srbova), a young lass of eastern European background who has a bus load of dodgy communist friends in tow, for whom Stalin’s reign of terror never happened.

Among these is Leo (Tom Hughes) to whom Joan is immediately attracted. He likes her too, in the sense that she’s malleable both to his point of view and to his designs on her body. Predictably Leo turns out to be a shifty, cold lover and it never really dawns on Joan that he’ll never love her as much as he loves Stalin.

After leaving University, Joan gets a job on a top secret research project developing the atom bomb. Initially she is just a secretary but her expertise in physics means her input and influence gradually increases aided by her creepy (and married) boss Max (Stephen Campbell Moore) who has the hots for her. 

Sadly the film, while well-made, lacks any real excitement or tension. Even a potentially exciting trip across the ocean to Canada under heavy military escort is underplayed but at least offers the chance for her to accede to an affair with Max, although it would appear a largely passionless one. 

The advantage of being a mere girl in 1930s\40s means that no believes she could even be involved on the atom bomb project let alone slipping nuclear secrets to the Soviets on the sly. So Max gets the blame when they suspect someone is in bed with the enemy. While Joan justifications for her behaviour ring very hollow and it is not at all clear that she believes in them herself.

Overall it is an ok film but it felt like a huge missed opportunity. It’s another of those films where the post-film googling is better than the film itself.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ is of course the new biopic of the late Ian Dury. Personally I was never a great fan of his music but I was still intrigued enough by the man to go see the film. I knew his life would make an interesting story.

Ian Dury contracted polio at the age of seven, most likely from a swimming pool during the polio epidemic of 1949. This resulted in him spending a year and a half in hospital, including six weeks in a full plaster cast, followed by an extended stay at a institution for disabled children, which resembled a prison and whose ethos was to toughen their 'inmates' up. A view further endorsed by Dury father, Bill (Ray Winstone) who aside from seeming to abandon his Son in the institution also believed in encouraging his son to stand on his own two feet and callipers. It was his sufferance of polio and his resultant treatment that probably moulded Dury into the determined and uncompromising man he became. If he felt he missed out on his childhood was lost, he was about to make up for it.

Golum himself, Andy Serkis, plays the role of Dury putting in a passionate and brilliantly believable performance. Serkis is uncannily like Dury and no mean singer either, performing all the songs himself along the real Blockheads.

Early on we are introduced to his first band, ‘Kilburn and the High Roads’, who are rehearsing at his home. Their session is ‘disrupted’ by the birth of his son upstairs. The film then takes us progressively through his career and chaotic life whilst throwing in flashbacks, animation and live performances along the way. It's all very well done.

His first band soon implodes but out of that he meets groupie Denise Roudette (Naomie Harris), who becomes his girlfriend, and Chaz Jankel (Tom Hughes). Jankel, a talent musician ten years younger than Dury, takes on the task of fashioning Dury's offbeat lyrics in to the songs that would make him fame as Ian Dury and The Blockheads. No much is actually said about their chart success, although we do get a demonstration of how quickly things can go awry once stardom is achieved.



The film is much more interested in his complicated relationships which Dury struggles to reconcile with his music career. Dury and his father; Dury and his women (his long suffering wife and his girlfriend); Dury and his Son, Baxter (Bill Milner of Son of Rambow). Baxter appeared on the sleeve of 'New Boots And Panties' with his father. Re-enacted here.



Dury is not a good role model for Baxter. Initially alienated by his father, he becomes increasingly in awe of his rebellious father and starts to mirror him and becomes a regular truant from school. In fact did he ever go? Baxter goes somewhat predictably off the rails.

Always the absent parent, Dury moves in with Denise and they live in a tower block in Vauxhall. A tower block that he calls ‘Catshit Mansions’. All the while he continues to do things in his own anarchic way, practising his well honed ability to rub people up the wrong way.

Then keen to give something back to people with disabilities like him, Dury records the notorious 'Spasticus Autisticus' as his contribution to 1982's United Nations Year of The Disabled. It is perhaps good intentioned but is subsequently banned and brings him into conflict with the Spastics Society who disagree with his assertion, passed down by his now late father, that people like him didn't want sympathy, they wanted respect.

Overall, it’s an excellent and playful film, just like its subject matter. Never sentimental although it had plenty of opportunities, had it wanted to be. Towards the end, as presumably Dury approached his own end, he died of cancer in 2000 at the age of just 57, he himself appears to regret nothing. ‘The only thing I've missed is a few buses’ he declares.



The end credits roll to Serkis’s rendition of ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’. Good stuff.