Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane McGowan is sad, raucously defiant and blackly funny
Crock of Gold - A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan @CrockofGoldFilm A deep dive into the life of the tortured Irish vocalist, best known as the lead singer and songwriter of the Pogues. Available everywhere 12/4. crockofgoldfilm.com
Widely regarded as the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941) was written by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz. Or was it? (15A) centres on the boozy veteran screenwriter Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), who is deposited in the desert with a typewriter and commissioned by Welles (Tom Burke) to write a screenplay about the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Matters are complicated from the off: bedridden as a result of an automobile accident, Mank has a complicated history with Hollywood in general, and with Hearst and his mistress, the actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), in particular.
Written by Jack Fincher, with David Fincher directing, Mank is a deliciously scabrous account of Hollywood’s Golden Age, with contemporary events in 1940 juxtaposed with regular flashbacks to the early 1930s, when Mankiewicz was a Hollywood darling and a frequent guest at Hearst’s soirées, where he rubbed shoulders with some of the titans who created LaLa Land, among them Louis B Mayer (Arliss Howard), Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) and David O Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore).
Delivered in glorious black-and-white, and studded with behind-the-scenes glimpses of Old Hollywood, the story incorporates Mankiewicz’s rise and self-inflicted fall and much more besides, although film scholars will likely pay most attention to the thesis which argues that Mankiewicz was solely responsible for crafting Citizen Kane (and which totally ignores the revolutionary approach Orson Welles took to adapting the screenplay).
Gary Oldman is in superb form here, wonderfully louche as the soused, embittered but still brilliant screenwriter, and he gets strong support from Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s long-suffering wife Sara and Charles Dance as the patrician Hearst. Amanda Seyfried, however, steals the show with a luminous, sympathetic portrayal of Mankiewicz’s confidante Marion Davies, whose reputation — even more so than Hearst himself — was butchered by her old friend’s hatchet-job.
(15A) opens with Maud (Morfydd Clark), a palliative care-giver, taking up a new position with Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), an ex-dancer in the terminal stages of cancer who is blissfully unaware that Maud’s true purpose in life is to save souls.
Writer-director Rose Glass offers a psychological thriller steeped in the metaphysical, albeit one in which we quickly realise that Maud is deeply unhinged: the voiceover comes courtesy of Maud speaking directly to God, imploring Him to reveal His plan and spare her the pain she is suffering. Meanwhile, the hedonistic Amanda isn’t taking death lying down.
Determined to go out with a bang, she’s ‘dangerously Norma Desmond’, hosting parties and scoffing at Maud’s attempts to redeem her soul before it’s too late.
There’s a noir quality to the inevitable collision between Maud’s joyless faith in the hereafter and Amanda’s irrepressible celebration of what little life remains, with cinematographer, Ben Fordesman, employing dimly-lit interiors and dramatic close-ups to emphasise the claustrophobic nature of the relationship.
Minor characters come and go (including one who, ominously, calls Maud by a different name, and seems surprised that she is back working as a care-giver after ‘the incident’), but Saint Maud is essentially a two-hander, with both actors brilliantly inhabiting their characters.
Morfydd Clark is excruciatingly passive-aggressive as the pallid, ascetic Maud, whose own monastic cell of a flat contrasts sharply with the stained-glass windows and baroque excess of Amanda’s home, while Jennifer Ehle is superb as she juggles Amanda’s rollercoaster mood swings between depressed acceptance and exuberant defiance.
Bleak in tone, but wholly compelling as the characters’ differing personalities begin to mesh in a symbiotic relationship of mutual distrust, Saint Maud is a visceral psychological thriller rooted in religious mania.
(18s) is a different kind of documentary than its director, Julien Temple, has previously delivered on the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and Keith Richards, among others. Perhaps that’s because its subject is virtually catatonic for much of the time, and a combative interviewee when he isn’t.
What results is a multi-faceted account of Shane McGowan’s life that blends animation, home movie footage, concert film and awkwardly strained conversations between McGowan and an eclectic procession of interviewers, which include Johnny Depp, Bobby Gillespie, Gerry Adams and — most poignantly — his wife, Victoria Mary Clarke.
Rooting McGowan’s cultural influences in his childhood holidays in rural Tipperary — depicted as a kind of Oirish Eden, with limitless fags and booze — the film charts the singer’s alienation as a London-Irish teenager in the 1970s, his punk awakening via the Sex Pistols, and his decision to embark on ‘a crusade to make Irish music hip again'.
By turns sad, raucously defiant and blackly funny, Crock of Gold is simultaneously a celebration, a cautionary tale and an unvarnished account of a singular life.
