After dinner, we watched Gambit, a favorite movie that never ceases to surprise us — the surprise being that Ronald Neame’s 1966 caper flick isn’t celebrated as a great Hollywood entertainment. Maybe the film is too good. For the first twenty minutes, we’re treated to the “perfectly planned” scenario that will bring Harry Dean (Michael Caine) into larcenous proximity with a fabulously valuable portrait bust; Nicole  Chang (Shirley MacLaine), an attractive Hong Kong taxi dancer, will run interference for him by mesmerizing the wealthiest man in the world (and the owner of the portrait bust), Ahmad Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), with recollections of his late wife. What you might miss the first time through is that, in the enactment of the plan, Nicole never utters a word. She is the perfect woman: mysterious and silent. By “too good,” I mean that things go hilariously downhill from there.

In fact, Nicole is something of a chatterbox. The movie ads teased viewers by giving them permission to tell their friends how the movie ends, as long as they didn’t tell how it begins. Because the beginning is a fantasy, a male pipe-dream in which careful forethought is mistaken for a guarantee of success. Harry Dean’s plan is a beaut. But it is just a plan, and it assumes that Harry knows all there is to know about his mark. In the end, of course, Harry is utterly dependent on Nicole’s ability to improvise escapes from potentially mortifying hot spots.

One of the film’s little jokes is that Harry Dean, a compleat Cockney (“What’s the matter wi’ you?”), pretends to be Sir Harold Dean, old Etonian (Thank you”). Harry thinks that he has done his homework, but he can’t tell Shahbandar the name of the headmaster back in the day. He hasn’t even taken the trouble to impersonate a baronet his own age. As Nicole discovers to her chagrin, Harry has concocted his plan in the friction-free laboratory of his own conceit.

***

In the Book Review this week, Dominique Browning reviews Frances Osborne’s book about her great-grandmother, The Bolter. In the review, Ms Browning refers to An Aesthete’s Lament, one of my blidgeted blogs and, indeed, the source of my awareness of the book, which, at the time, was not available here in the United States. So I did what Idina Sackville (the Bolter) would have done and ordered a copy from Amazon in England (“Amazuke.”) I’m not saying that Idina Sackville would have gone to any trouble about ordering a book — she doesn’t appear to have been much of a reader — but she tended to traverse with dispatch the shortest distance between herself and what she wanted.

Sadly, though, The Bolter has not turned out to be a book that I want to read. Much of the book is good enough or better, but much of it is quite regrettable, at least by my lights. Here is Paris, shortly after the beginning of the Great War:

Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages and petites rues led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stoned bâtiments descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines — pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

These comely and inviting phrases describe Paris to a T, as indeed I can attest from my last visit, in 2003. Ms Osborne’s flourish captures what we might call the Eternal Paris, but it lacks the frank decency to begin, “Paris, then as now…” The sheer padding-ness of her sweet little paragraph is so egregious that it’s funny. But The Bolter is not a funny book.

And, let’s face it: “Paris was a city of façades” is a statement that deserves to be chiseled on a marble slab at the Prep School Hall of Bull Shit Fame. The author sometimes appears determined to be as verbally depraved as her thrice-plus-twice divorced great-grandmother was sexually. Indeed, it was doubtful that I’d finish The Bolter, until Ms Browning’s reference to An Aesthete’s Lament. That pricked my sense of responsibility. One of the Aesthete’s readers would have to file a book report; it might as well be me. Which is abominable conceit for you, as Ms Browning, also quite clearly a reader, has not only done the job but been paid for it.

***

It’s not that I’m a pessimist, really, but I don’t go in for the kind of daydream that, in Gambit, leads Harry Dean down the garden path. Instead of foreseeing that a plan will proceed like clockwork, I anticipate elaborately contingent disasters. My attempt to withdraw money from a local ATM, for example, will be thwarted by an out-of -control, Taking of Pelham-type “police activity” in the subway station below the bank. The Harry Deans of the world would take up dishwashing if they had to run their schemes by me for approval.

That’s why, once the initial surprise mellowed into ongoing delight, I decided not to mention my grandchild’s existence until his or her graduation from high school. I was tempted, just now, to specify a college graduation, but that prediction seemed uncomfortably fraught. Perhaps college will be completely passé in 2031 — and how likely is it that I’ll be compos mentis at the age of 83? As it is, the child’s more immediate hurdle is birth itself, an event that will roughly coincide with my turning 62. Which I don’t dare to look forward to!

Kathleen, however, is knitting.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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