The Capricious Thoughts of Peter Crispin

More 'Film Opaque' than 'Film Noir', Touch of Evil is an unparrelled cinematic study of corruption, racism and the morality of the Law.

Welles' direction is again light years ahead of anything contemporaneous, the Mexican border town locale being all shadows, smoke, grime and black & white neon, framed by low angles, long tracking shots and car-mounted cameras. Charlton Heston and Vivien Leigh are good foils to Welles' monstrous police chief Quinlan, the do-gooding newly-weds who are enmeshed in the local web of sin and cartelism.

A proto-Chinatown, this thought-provoking yet highly entertaining film is as good as it gets for the noir genre.

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Although it may be somewhat predictable to cite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that "there are no second acts in American lives" when reviewing an American autobiography, Gore Vidal vividly proves there are occasions where there’s enough for a second volume, let alone a second chapter. Palimpest, Vidal’s first set of recollections, ended in 1963, covering the writer’s initial success, his forays into Hollywood script writing, and his first attempt to get into Congress. This second volume ostensibly covers his life and career from ’64 to the present, when Vidal returned to novel writing, became an established political commentator and all-round divisive US intellectual, revered and reviled in equal measure. Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir is far more than that, however, as Vidal for the most part reins in his (admittedly entertaining) excesses, to write what is an effect an elegy for liberal America, currently culturally occupied by Neo-conservatives, the Religious Right and an asinine and spineless media.

Gore Vidal
This dominating taste for nostalgia does not mean that Vidal the radical has become some kind of embittered ‘Leftie’, as he has always championed progress and recognises its benefits. The decline of the popular novel and the cultural placement of the household novelist is met by Vidal with ambivalence if not apathy, as he boldly states the key and central role the Hollywood movies of his youth had in firing his imagination and his intellectual appetite – quite an admission for such an avaricious autodidact (Vidal, surprisingly, never attended a university). His novels set in the classical world were fuelled just as much by a youthful exposure to Boris Karloff in The Mummy as they were from reading Cicero. Rightly he pours disdain on those who cynically straddle the two disciplines of scriptwriting and novel-writing (step forward Dan Brown), as one would expect from Vidal despite his background in both fields. But it is refreshing to have a mind such as Vidal's move with grace and general appreciation from low brow to high brow without condescension. But Vidal clearly identifies us living in a ‘post-Gutenberg’ age:

Recently I observed to a passing tape recorder that I was once a famous novelist. When assured, that I was still when known and read, I explained myself. I was speaking, I said, not of me personally but of a category to which I once belonged that has now ceased to exist. I am still here but the category is not. To speak of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. How can a novelist be famous – no matter how well known he may be personally to the press? – if the novel itself is of litte consequence to the civilised, much less to the generality? The novel as teaching aid is something else, but hardly famous.

For Vidal, it’s not so much the means of communication but what is being communicated. Throughout these memoirs, the US media is taken to task, especially the print media with particular venom reserved for The New York Times, who blacklisted his books from its reviews section throughout the 1950s and early 1960s due the homosexual angle to his first novel, The City and The Pillar. However, Vidal clearly fears the loss of the individual and critical voice in the mass media:

Today, where literature was movies are. Whether or not the Tenth Muse does her act on a theatre screen or within the cathode tube, there can be no other reality for us since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of. For the Agora, Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut. In fact, reading of any kind is on the decline. Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president – the same half?

Vidal though is happy for himself to straddle media. In Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, he ruefully recalls how he inadvertently invented the press junket in the early 60s as he ends up talking about his novel Julian on a chatshow while trying to advance his poltical career (a tale told with such insouciance, you believe him), and devotes a whole chapter on reflecting on a thesis called How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV. It's telling that the subtitle of the thesis is The Lessons of Gore Vidal.

Vidal in Fellini's Roma, the recording of which is described in Point to Point Navigation.
Whether or not you consider Vidal a real intellectual, what is truly remarkable about him is how much he lived the American Twentieth Century, his real education having been there as and when it happens, whether at the epicentre or on its fringes. Point to Point Navigation reflects on his sideman role in Kennedy’s Camelot (he was related to the soon-to-be Jacqueline Onassis), his friendships with Tennessee Williams, Saul Below, Federico Fellini, Princess Margaret, Sam Spiegal, Rudolf Nureyev, Orson Welles, Tom Driberg, Grace Kelly and Graham Greene, and his childhood that was dominated by his Senatorial grandfather and his aviator pioneer of a father who had a key role in FDR’s 30s administration.

Even before puberty, Vidal was casually coming across people such as Clark Gable and Amelia Earhart. He merely carried on as he begun, and Vidal (for the most part) namedrops with a purpose, revealing telling vignettes of these well-know faces, either accentuating popular perception or debunking myth in the process. He is charitable with his enemies as he is vicious of his friends, and there are well-rounded portraits of people such as Barry Goldwater, which comes as a genuine surprise although his demolition of Barbara Cartland is a true joy to behold and one that wont be ruined here. As with all his writings, Vidal captures the flavour and the mores of the time he describes.

Gore Vidal today
Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir is just as meandering as Palimpest, eschewing chronology for thematic reminiscence. While just as acerbic and gossipy as its predecessor, Point to Point Navigation is more pointed and elegiac. Despite the perception of his critics as remorseless self-promoter and mischievous-but-aimless provocateur, Vidal comes across here as a rounded, cogent individual, tempering remorse for his partner and for time gone by with his critical faculties alone. As would be appropriate for someone who has chronicled so much of America history either through his fiction or political commentary, Vidal strikes you as a true patriot aghast at the liberties being taken against Liberty by the current US Administration.

All memoirs are self-serving, so it comes as no surprise, although a disappointment, that Vidal does not address some of the more recent and controversial causes that he has been involved with, such the correspondence he struck up with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh or his more choice comments on 9/11. Also, a sour note is stuck by the repeated pilloring of his biographer, Fred Kaplan, whose inaccuracies seem relatively trivial and of more interest to Vidal than the reader of this memoir. These faults do not detract from Vidal the man or this entertaining, revealing book that is essential reading for those interested in Vidal’s work or the higher echelons of the American establishment in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir is published in hardback in the UK by Little Brown, priced £17.99.