The story of Charles Mulli, chronicled in the documentary, Mully, would have offered a remarkable story even without its amazing second act. But that second act is nothing less than astonishing.
I was late in seeing this film, which I’ve known about since its release in 2017. One of its co-producers, Lukas Behnken, happens to be the son of one of my oldest friends, my college roommate Dixey Behnken. I should have believed what Dixey told me about it.
Charles Mulli was born in poverty in a village in Kenya. One morning when he was six, he woke to discover his family had disappeared overnight – they’d just moved away, leaving him behind. Then followed years of living on the street and begging, until he finally found work. He worked hard and made his way up the corporate pyramid, eventually owning his own bus company and becoming regional distributor for an oil company. He was a genuinely rich man in a genuinely poor country.
Then one day some street boys hijacked his car. Riding home on one of his own buses, Charles couldn’t keep himself from thinking about the boys who robbed him. They were himself, he realized, as he might have been. As a Christian, he felt a divine call to do something about it.
So he went onto the streets, found a couple homeless kids, and took them home with him. Then more. Then even more. He never stopped. His wife and children didn’t know how to deal with it, especially when he sent his own kids away to boarding school in order to make room for more orphans. Finally they all moved to a big new facility, and they established Mully Children’s Family, a wide-ranging enterprise that raises food and earns profits which are then poured back into several large children’s homes.
“Mully” relates this moving story through dramatic recreations and filmed interviews. It’s all fascinating and riveting – sometimes hardly believable. Inspirational. Deeply challenging.
Highly recommended. I watched it on Amazon Prime, but you can see it for free here.
I watched an interesting movie, on a friend’s recommendation, and I think it’s worth reviewing.
The Outfit, which I watched on Amazon Prime, is a production that looks as if it was adapted from a stage play, because pretty much everything happens on just one set. But it’s not; it’s just an extremely focused drama, and it works effectively that way.
Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance) is an Englishman who runs a tailor shop in Chicago in 1956 – though he insists he’s not a tailor, but a “cutter.” Tailors, he says, just mend clothing.
His shop is located in the territory of an Irish criminal gang. The big boss is his most important customer. Although some of the people he makes suits for are anything but savory, Leonard is a complete professional, treating them all as gentlemen, studiously ignoring what they do for a living.
But what they do for a living doesn’t ignore him. They’ve installed a sealed drop box in his shop, and from time to time they leave letters and packages there for retrieval. Leonard pretends it’s not there. A worse intrusion is the attention the big boss’s son Richie (Dylan O’Brien) has been paying to Leonard’s young receptionist, Mable (Zoe Deutsch). Leonard has paternal feelings for her, and is concerned.
Then one night one of the other gangsters, Francis (Johnny Flynn) shows up with a wounded Richie. Richie has been shot by a rival gang, and he needs to lay low until their enemies have gone away. Francis demands Leonard stitch Richie’s wound up, and demands he hide a briefcase. He says the briefcase contains a tape recording made by some “rat” who’s betrayed them all. He leaves Richie there with Leonard, and the two talk.
That’s all I’ll tell you about the plot. Speaking as a writer, I wasn’t entirely happy with the plot. It’s one of those stories where a character creates an intricate plan that fools both their opponents and the audience. However, just one small miscalculation here would have been fatal, and in real life something always does go wrong. Too tight a battle plan is a recipe for disaster, as any good general knows.
Nevertheless, if you suspend your disbelief on that point, The Outfit is very impressive. Ryland is pitch-perfect as the cutter – one of those quiet men who’s got a lot more going on under the surface than anybody guesses. All the performances are excellent, though.
I was busy translating today, and then I was busy catching up on things I neglected so I could do the translating. So what to post tonight?
My latest default seems to be finding Andrew Klavan videos, because nobody does the writing job better in our time.
The clip above concerns his novel Another Kingdom, so it’s a few years old. I remember the period when he was writing it particularly, because at the time I was enjoying a brief period of personal contact with him. I’d written a glowing review of the Weiss-Bishop novels for The American Spectator, and he e-mailed me to thank me. About the same time he made a request, on the blog he was doing at the time, for recommendations on good Christian fantasies to read, saying he was writing his own first Christian fantasy and wanted to check the field out. I sent him a file of my e-book, Troll Valley.
I never heard another word from him. Ah, well. Maybe I should have sent him Death’s Doors. Or The Year of the Warrior. Or just kept silent. One never knows.
Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom in the 1985 “Shadowlands”
My metaphorical Advent calendar opened today and dispensed paying translating work. This is excellent. I’ve been idle for a couple months, and I can use the income. An interesting project, too.
So, little time for reading and no book to review today. Of what shall I write?
I watched the Most Reluctant Convert movie, as I said. Then I watched it again. And last night I thought, “Might as well watch Shadowlands too, and close the circuit.” And when I say Shadowlands, I mean, of course, the original 1985 BBC production with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. The 1993 version, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, isn’t even on my radar. I watched it once and was unimpressed (except by Winger, who is much closer to the real Joy Davidman than the refined Claire Bloom. But otherwise the 1985 version is more authentic and more concerned with the characters’ Christian faith. My impression of the 1993 movie is that it portrays Lewis as an immature man rescued by True Love. And his Christianity is regarded as one of his immature traits).
Anyway, you get a pretty good overview of Lewis’ life by watching the two movies in sequence. The Most Reluctant Convert offers a fairly authentic (though necessarily incomplete) picture of Lewis’ life up to his conversion. Shadowlands (if you watch the right version) gives a broadly decent impression of what happened in his later years, when he got married and suffered bereavement and a crisis of faith.
Of course, it’s an incomplete picture, as any cinematic portrayals must be. The Most Reluctant Convert leaves out much of the story, notably Lewis’ unhappy time in English public schools (what we’d call private academies in this country). And the book it’s based on, Surprised by Joy, omits much in the first place. In particular, Lewis’ domestic life with Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the Great War, whom Lewis cared for in fulfillment of a promise to that friend. He wouldn’t have liked that story re-told; it began in infatuation in his atheist days and was transformed into voluntary servanthood after his conversion.
Shadowlands is a moving story, but heavily tailored to its dramatic form. Jack’s and Joy’s marriage actually lasted four years – her sons were nearly grown and away at school when she died. The affecting scene at the end where Jack and the boy Douglas Gresham grieve together never happened – sadly.
Most of all I was wondering what Jack himself would have thought about all this bother. And I thought I’d ponder that tonight in this post, to see if I could figure out what I think. I’m pretty sure Jack would have been mortified by the whole business. Aside from his personal modesty, there’s the fact that he deplored any examination of a writer’s life in order to interpret his work. The work, he frequently insisted, must stand on its own. It’s not for the critic to poke around in the author’s history and personality, hunting for repressions and obsessions.
Although I’m pretty sure he didn’t object to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Because that’s a work of literature in its own right.
However, the two films I’m discussing are works of art in their own rights too. So does that make it OK?
Well, we have to deal with things as they are, I suppose. Whether he liked it or not, Jack Lewis was an interesting man. And people who love his books frequently want to know more about the man who wrote them.
This interest, surprisingly, even generally survives their first exposure to a picture of Lewis, something he himself described as a “most undecorative object.”
Maybe – and I’m very likely projecting here – it’s the fact that people experience Lewis’ writings as letters from a friend. We’d very much like to have a friend like that. Friendship is an experience that’s fallen on hard times in our evil world. Lewis had a splendid gift for friendship, as we know from his life story.
I know what he’d say to that, though – “Do you live on a deserted island? Is there no church in your community? You might be surprised what qualities lie concealed in the people in the next pew.”
The blurb says,“You’ve never met a spy like this before!” That’s false advertising. Charles Bishop, hero of Kiss My Assassin (apologies for the title), is almost indistinguishable from James Bond. He does the same job, has the same way with women, and gets into the same kind of scrapes as Bond (at least the movie Bond). I suppose the author’s attempts at witty dialogue are intended to make the atmosphere a little lighter than a Bond story, but I didn’t find the wit very sharp, myself.
When the Turkish ambassador to Great Britain is arrested on Westminster Bridge after a naked male body flies out of his car trunk, Bishop is sent to talk to him at his residence (diplomatic complications have delayed his being detained by police). The ambassador tells Bishop that it doesn’t matter what he does – he’s going to be dead by the end of the day. He says he got an opportunity to participate in a highly secret illegal arms auction, but since the dead man, the sellers’ agent, died – accidentally – the arms brokers, who are not understanding sorts, will certainly kill him and his family.
Fireworks ensue, and soon Bishop is off to Marrakech, where he meets a seductive woman and a brutish Russian agent, who turns into an unlikely ally. In the honored tradition of movie action heroes, Bishop will kill an improbable number of enemy agents, and though he’ll suffer several traumatic injuries, including gunshot wounds, he’ll still drag himself out his hospital bed to give it one more go.
I’ve read a lot of improbable action thrillers, so I could have gone happily along for the ride if I’d liked the main character. But I took a dislike to Charles Bishop almost from the start. The dialogue, I think, was meant to be clever, but it didn’t amuse me. An attempt at one point to make Bishop sensitive to male sexism struck me as both false and a little prissy.
The writing isn’t awful, but I don’t recommend Kiss My Assassin. As you might expect, there was quite a lot of sex, some of it pretty kinky.
I finally saw it. I touted the film, The Most Reluctant Convert when it first appeared in theaters, but didn’t get around to going myself. Because I’m old, and there’s Covid, and it would have been a long drive, etc., etc. But now I’ve got the DVD, and I must say I was impressed. Better even than I expected.
Essentially, this production is a dramatization of Lewis’ memoir, Surprised by Joy, with some The Weight of Glory thrown in. Originally a stage play, the film adaptation takes an interesting approach. We start with the filming preparations, as makeup people finish their work on the actor Max McLean. Then he seems to nod off, and when he lifts his head he’s Lewis. He walks out of the studio and directly into the Museum of Natural History at Oxford, all the while discussing how he moved from atheism to Christianity. As we follow, the film alternates between the “present” – Lewis talking to the camera – and recreations of dramatic scenes from his life. Often Lewis sits on the sidelines, watching his younger self, a dramatic element I rather like.
The production is really very well done all around. It has an authentic look; the acting is excellent. Good costumes and sets. The actors even vaguely resemble the people they’re playing. And the story is presented with what I think is considerable power. Some memorable parts of Surprised, like Lewis’ miserable time in public school, are skipped over as the narrative sticks with the main topic.
Max McLean is good – I won’t say great – as Lewis. In makeup he resembles the man, in a sort of rubber-faced way. Having never met Lewis, I can’t really say more with any authority, but I still think the definitive portrayal is Joss Ackland’s in the original BBC version of Shadowlands (which had the same director as this film). Ackland looked less like Lewis, but had the physical bulk and booming voice. And he’d clearly studied Lewis’ mannerisms. He also wore his hat with the brim turned down all the way around, which McLean neglects to do for some reason. (Somebody must have told him about this, I would think.)
But these are quibbles. All in all, The Most Reluctant Convert is a highly successful and impressive adaptation. I’m glad I bought it.
I’m reading a very long book right now, and so it’ll be a while yet before I have a review ready. Instead I share the picture above.
This photo was taken way back in the last century, in June of 1994. That young, thin, dark-bearded figure on the ship’s bridge is your obedient servant. The ship is the Fram, the arctic exploration vessel designed for Fridtjof Nansen and later used by Roald Amundsen as well. It’s in a museum all its own in Oslo, not far from the Viking Ship Museum. When I reviewed Nansen’s book Farthest North in January, almost a year ago, I vaguely remembered having this picture, and looked around for it. Couldn’t find it. Today I happened to open a photo album in the basement, and there it was. So I share it with you now, to your wonder and amazement, I have no doubt.
“Fram” means “forward.” It’s Norway’s traditional motto, based on the reported war cry of St. Olaf’s men at the battle of Stiklestad: “Forward, forward, Christ-men, cross-men, king’s men!”
This was my first trip to Norway, and I took it with my dad. My mother had died recently, and Dad proposed that we go together. “I’ll pay for the travel; you cover the rest of your own costs,” he said. Couldn’t say no to that. That was when I first met my relatives over there. It was the first of five delightful journeys.
I continue to yammer to all and sundry about the novel The Last of the Vikings. Today The American Spectator printed a second review by me.
There’s a fascinating section in The Last of the Vikings where the fishermen ask Lars to read to them from A Happy Boy, and they’re all transported by the story: “It had never struck them before that a house and land can be so beautiful despite their being small. They did not know that poor people could have so much sunshine.”
And then another fisherman comes in carrying a radical newspaper called the Dawn. He’s been bringing copies in periodically for Lars to read aloud, and they’ve all enjoyed reviling the greedy capitalists. But now the fishermen’s attitude has changed. They tell the agitator, to his shock, to get out and take his paper with him…
Back in the late Jack Higgins’ heyday, I used to buy all his novels as they appeared, because he wrote a tight, compelling story, and when Christianity came up it was generally treated respectfully. As time went on I got the feeling he was starting to phone it in, telling the same story over and over with different settings and only superficially different characters.
But it had been a while since I’d read a Higgins, so I took advantage of a bargain on one of his early books, Comes the Dark Stranger. I don’t think he’d found his stride yet at this point in his career, but the book was entertaining.
Martin Shane shows up in the English town of Burnham, looking for an old army buddy. But not in a good way. He’d been with a commando group in Korea, all from the same town, and he and his friends were taken prisoner and tortured. One of them, under threat of execution, had broken and given the interrogator what he wanted. Then Martin’s best friend was executed. Martin vowed revenge, but then suffered a brain injury that kept him hospitalized for eight years. Recently he got his memory back. He needs brain surgery to remove shrapnel before it kills him, but before he goes under the knife, Martin is going to identify the Judas and kill him.
Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. Everyone has a story. Somebody’s lying. As Martin endures recurring, crippling headaches, he questions and threatens and gets people angry, hoping the culprit will give something away. At some points, he’s not even sure the things he remembers actually happened. In the end, he’ll get an answer he doesn’t want.
Comes the Dark Stranger touched all the bases as far as thriller plotting is concerned. My problem with the book is that I didn’t really believe in the characters. I didn’t think some of them were responding naturally, but were just doing what was necessary to advance the plot.
Still, the book wasn’t bad. Moderately recommended.
I’ve been following Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series about hardboiled runewright/detective Alex Lockerby for some time. The books aren’t high literature, but they’re a rare example of modern urban fantasy that I find entertaining. The latest book is Hidden Voices.
Alex Lockerby is thrust into the turmoil of European affairs when William Donovan, creator of the OSS, asks him to transport to Austria and rescue an alchemist who possesses a valuable secret formula the Nazis want. The job – of course – turns out to be more dangerous than expected, but Alex manages to bring the alchemist home. And then it goes wrong on this end.
Meanwhile, he’s also hired to investigate the murder of a famous vaudeville musician, beaten to death with his own mandolin.
Supported and assisted by his girlfriend, the sorceress Sorsha, Alex comes through (even battling the Aryan Superman) to champion the cause of freedom and identify the guilty.
I wish the author had worked harder to master 1930s diction – he thinks, for instance, that Alex would have called the “#” symbol a “pound sign” rather than a hash mark. But most people can’t remember how they talked in the old days anymore, so I suppose it’s not important. The story was fun and there was no objectionable material. Recommended.
