Reviews: the Book was Better

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The Book Was Better: the Triumphs and Travesties of Book to Film Adaptation,
Louise Willder,
One World Publications

Now here’s a rather tasty little treat for those of us who adore both film and books, a little meditation on something that, let’s be honest, every reader who like cinema has thought at some point, especially when it involves an adaptation of a personal favourite read – “the book was better”. It’s a subject almost as old as the medium of cinema itself – I’m sure there were some debating what was lost translating works like Dracula to the big screen in the 1930s, or Margaret Mitchell’s phenomenally popular Gone With the Wind, way back in the day, and it is something we still worry about and debate. And not just we readers – sometimes the authors too; recall the late Anne Rice, queen of vampire fiction, when Tom Cruise was first announced as the actor to play the six foot, slim, blonde, French aristocratic vampire Lestat in Neil Jordan’s lush filmic adaptation of Interview With the Vampire.

To be quite fair to Rice, many of us who loved the book had pretty similar feelings at the time of that announcement, and to be just as fair to us, given the disparity in appearance between the actor and the described character, that’s not exactly surprising. Of course, as it turned out in the end, Cruise threw himself into the role, losing weight to highlight cheekbones, bringing out that decadent vicious streak that Lestat holds. And this is part of the appeal of Willder’s book for me – this is no ponderous academic work, pontificating on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic nature of the text, while stroking one’s beard in a thoughtful manner (yes, I am thinking of some of my former college lecturers here!), it’s written by someone who clearly loves books and films, and has opinions on which work and which do not (and why). You may agree with some, disagree with others, but you’ll most likely find yourself nodding in understanding regardless.

I should make clear this is no cinematic bashing tome though – Willder is not out to trash all cinema and venerate all literature, oh no. While she will discuss bad adaptations – including some corkers that are in chapters headed “Unwatchables” and “Unfilmables”, she also lavishes praise on good adaptations of books, some which are as pure as they can be to the source, given it is a different medium and therefore requires some alterations (it is, after all, an adaptation). There are also some where additions or nuances worked into the filmic version seem to her to actually enhance and improve the original story.

There’s even a chapter on where it was the other way round (in her opinion, and she makes clear it is just personal opinions here), where she talks about films which she considers better than the book, such as Jaws. It was a huge bestseller, of course, hence why the studio bought the rights, but to many it was also a pot-boiler, what many in the publishing trade refer to as “an airport bestseller” (the sort of thing you pick up in an airport newsagents when desperate for anything to read on a long flight). Having read Jaws (at a far too tender age when I probably shouldn’t have), I tend to agree with her on that one, and find the film far more satisfying, although I’m not sure I agree with her on the Godfather, but that’s the nature of this kind of thing, some parts you will totally agree with, other parts you think no, I love that film version! But it is presented in a friendly, non-adversarial manner, it’s something to enjoy, discuss, think about, not get into a frothing rage over.

Willder also includes something we all have – guilty pleasures. We all know there are film versions that strictly speaking aren’t very good, and yet, for some reason, they click with us and we love them. Sometime it is a sentimental thing, something we remember watching with friends when younger and that makes it special in a way that it isn’t to others (a recent conversation with younger colleagues about me revisiting Goonies went in this direction, with them thinking it was an “okay” film but didn’t get why I and others my age loved it, but also realising if they had been around when it first came out, it too might be more special to them than it is).

And yes, Willder will put up her hand here and say okay, Colin Firth emerging from his swim in that dripping wet shirt, sticking to his body, and how that’s imprinted on a generation of Austen fans forever (which I can quite understand! Personally I still swoon over Winona in that red dress in Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

Overall the theme here is not to create raging arguments (and goodness knows we have enough of those on some fan sites at times!), but to appeal to people who, like Willder, love books and love cinema, seeing neither as superior or inferior to the other, just different artforms that have to work in their own ways, and some will, some sort of will, some will crash and burn, some will be, as she puts it “did they even read the book?” types, others are a fabulous triumph that enhance the book (and bring new readers to the source material too, a win-win).

It’s a fun, informal and personal take – you will agree and disagree, sometimes you may not know the book or film, but you will still get the vibe. I only wish it had been a little longer and dived a little deeper, but then it may have become more ponderous and lost the chatty, friendly “talking in the pub” kind of feel it has. With the festive season bearing down on us soon, this one will make an ideal gift for anyone in your life who is a reader and a film lover – and given you are reading Live For Films, I strongly suspect that’s a fair amount of you! And I also suspect many of you are already thinking on some of your own, personal favourite book to film works, and some of the ones you loathe, but that’s part of the fun here.

If you can’t buy from a local, physical bookshop, you can order the book via Bookshopdotorg, which allows you to order online, while nominating an indpendent bookshop of your choice to get a cut from the sale – better than giving more money to Bezos to buy another yacht or bankroll Trump’s ballroom!

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Rainy Evening

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That I like night shots of the city is no secret – since I was a kid playing with the “B” setting on my first 35mm film camera (a compact Ricoh with manual controls, so I could learn before moving onto an SLR), I have been fascinated with the way the camera can see the nocturnal world in a way that our eyes cannot, through a long exposure (sometimes just half a second, an eternity for a camera lens, sometimes several seconds, sometimes a minute to really drink in every bit of light in a very dark area).

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But there is something even more compelling about nocturnal, urban shots on a rainy evening – the way the traffic lights, street lights, headlamps of vehicles, all glisten and reflect on the wet roads and pavements, creating a very distinct and atmospheric look.

Haymarket On A Rainy Evening 06

Haymarket On A Rainy Evening 05

I was returning from visiting dad, and so not carrying my tripod, or even Professor Bendylegs, my mini-tripod with the, yes, bendy legs. But as I exited Haymarket Station at the tail-end of Blue Hour on a rainy autumn evening, the scene was too good not to try and capture. So I did what I often do and improvised my long exposure shots, setting the mode and timer on the camera, then sitting it on handy posts or railings with flat tops, to steady it enough for a long exposure.

It doesn’t always work, but often does – obviously unlike a tripod you are very restricted in your choice of angles. You can sit the camera flat on this surface to steady it, but you can’t do up or down or angle it sideways. But within those restrictions you can still sometimes improvise something interesting, capture a moment of the city’s life.

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Haymarket On A Rainy Evening 03

Another thing which has fascinated me since I was a kid first messing around with camera settings, is that the long exposure not only drinks in more light than your eye, to show details it is too dark for human vision to make out clearly, it also has a fascinating effect on moving subjects. People in the background are blurred by movement, but still fairly recognisable, but those closer to the camera become transparent, like phantoms, ghosts walking the night, caught by the artificial eye. Passing vehicles are stretched out (like the “warp speed visual effect in Star Trek), or else vanish altogether, but long “light trails” from them remain, showing their track, while the vehicle itself often vanishes.

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Haymarket On A Rainy Evening 01

This one was much rougher, as it was handheld – there was nothing nearby I could sit the camera on to steady it and fit in the illuminated entrance to the original part of the rail station, so freehand it was. I took several shots, in black and white mode, this one, still rather rough, was the only one that was passable. But it had that kind of Noir look to it that I liked, and sometimes a little roughness suits that kind of subject matter. I must have done something right, because this one pic got over a thousand views and fifty favourites in the first 24 hours of posting it on my Flickr photo site (now over 1200 views and 61 faves, not bad for a spur-of-the moment shot taken walking home on a went night).

Haymarket Noir

The End Of September

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And thus ends September,
And Summer’s last ember
Still flickers and glows,
The colour of an autumn leaf,
As the river of Seasons flows
Into the Firth of Time,
With all our hopes and grief.

I have no idea where that came from, my head is often full of words, and sometimes those words come together. The first line just popped up in my head this afternoon, and the moment I wrote it down, the second line came straight to me. I wrote the rest in a few minutes, so it is a bit rough, but considering it was written in about ten minutes, I’m fairly pleased with it…

And the cancer circus fun goes on and on…

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And so an update on this evil, awful, bastard of a year: the cancer treatment is still ongoing, months later, which is, as you can imagine, incredibly depressing and demoralising. Back towards the end of July I had the last of the seriously awful, three hour IV chemotherapy sessions, where basically poison is pumped through your body, making your feel dreadful, buggering up healthy cells as well as the cancerous ones (it’s a blunderbuss weapon compared to a sniper rifle), ruining your immune system, white blood cell count and attacking your nervous system. It is also cumulative, so each session felt worse than the preceding one, and the recovery time took longer. So I am very glad to get that bit done.

It was a combination therapy of those long IV poisoning torture sessions and two weeks of highly toxic pills (eight a day), so nasty you are told not to touch them, pop them from the blister right into a cup then swallow. So they are so bad you shouldn’t touch them, but you are to ingest them… Yes, welcome to cancer care, where all the medicine is a fucking poison…

After the last IV session I had two more weeks on the pills, then an appointment with the oncologist after that in early August, so I fairly naturally assumed that was going to be the “it’s all done meeting”. Was it hell. Nope, she said she thought I needed further treatment to be sure. Quite demoralising, as you may imagine, when you think after eight months (since being sent for scans to diagnosis to surgery to recovery enough to then undergo brutal chemo) thank god it is done… And it isn’t. Thought perhaps another couple of weeks, oh no, four more sessions they said, each being two weeks of pills and a week to recover then repeat. Which takes me to the end of October. Oh, and the pills now go up to ten a day.

Brutalist Care
(the weird, Brutalist-inspired architecture of the cancer centre at the Western General)

So that took what little wind was in my sails off to the land of nothing good. Frankly it left me so bloody miserable that what I thought was over wasn’t even nearly over. I was in today for yet another poison session, and this time they upped the bloody meds to now twelve a day, ye gods. Because I have recovered some of the weight loss during the cancer and surgery time when I struggled to eat, and of course meds are often calculated according to size, mass etc. I understand that, but it’s still bloody depressing, not just to still be on these, but now on even more.

The thing is, back in August the oncologist, just to make me feel even happier about all this, told me they wanted me to do more on the pills but have to be careful as they will eventually cause irreperable, permanent damage to my body. Swell – stop now and hope it is all gone and not going to come back, or take months more of the toxic pills and hope it doesn’t destroy the healthy parts of your body. What sort of choice is that for anyone to have to make??? So today when they upped the level of these damaging drugs, I was understandably upset and concerned, so the specialist talked to me for a while.

Brutalist Care 2

End of the day, what bloody choice do I have but to continue with this horrible, toxic regime? But I am long since past the end of my fucking tether, frankly. I’ve had enough, more than enough, of this miserable time, and I still have weeks more of it to endure, now at an even higher level of dosage. If the oncologist in November tells me anything other than it’s all fine and done, they will hear me screaming in every fucking parellel dimension. I’ve gotten so tired of it all now I don’t even keep up hope or faith that it will be finished then or not.

And frankly, even if it finally is done this time, I can’t imagine any sense of relief, just weary resignation, because bastard cancer is never, ever really over. You will worry the rest of your life about it coming back. Every time you feel odd, or ill, you will worry it is the cancer cells returning, destroying you from within. Yes, they will scan me regularly for just that sort of thing, I know (the level of care has been incredible, bless our NHS and its staff), but still, no sense of rejoicing, just a tired appreciation that the treatment is done for now, but always wondering at the back of your mind what if it comes back?

Very, very, very tired; that’s going to be pretty much a full year of this now, and I’m worn down by it all.

The Stars My Destination…

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I do love Robert Wilde’s time-consuming work, taking a scene from Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country (the final film with the original series crew), and reworking it and the soundtrack, with painstakingly crafted and rendered animations. The result takes the original scene of the Enterprise leaving the gigantic, Spacedock orbiting above the Earth, and makes it a far more memorable scene.

Lovely little touches like the thrusters to gently move the ship in port, just like the Shuttle or a satellite today would do, tiny little touches on the thrusters for fine moves, then the powerful impulse engines glowing into life, ready to propel this huge ship out into her natural habitat – deep space. And that final scene as she surges out, eager to be out there again, where she belongs…

I’ve always considered the Big E herself to be an actual character in Star Trek – she is as important as the human actors. And the Enterprise is also a symbol of what humans could become – this huge, immensely powerful vessel, capable of traversing enormous distances, of directing frighteningly powerful weapons…

And yet, she is no warship, she is designed primarily for research and exploration. Not conquest or battles, to explore, to seek out new civiisations and make contact with them, to expand the knowledge of the universe. The idea in Trek that humans by the 23rd century would be capable of creating such astonishing craft, and using them for peaceful exploration, is a part of the optimism in Trek, that humanity can be better than it is now. The ship herself is a symbol of optimism and hope, something we all desperately need.

Autumn calls

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Autumn is not quite here fully yet, the trees are still mostly leafed in greenery, but more and more gold and brown leaves are showing, the pavements have more fallen leaves creating a crunching carpet underfoot. It may not be quite here yet, but autumn is knocking on summer’s door. I don’t mind – autumn in our northern kingdom, on a nice day, creates the most glorious colours, illuminated by a sunlight that is stretched out now to a soft, golden copper. Gorgeous.

Autumn Is Knocking On The Door 02

Autumn Is Knocking On The Door 01

Fringe After Dark

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The Fringe after dark…

Fringe After Dark 01

Coming out of a Fringe show at the Teviot (the student union building for Edinburgh Uni, which resembles the Edinburgh branch of Hogwarts), I took some time to walk around Bristo Square and nearby George Square after dark, the area busy and lit up with food stalls and vans and housing temporary performance venues for many Fringe shows.

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Fringe After Dark 03

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Hiya, Pals

(above: “Hiya, Pals!” – Fringe banner hanging off Teviot at night during the festival. Below: McEwan Hall, where my graduation ceremony took place a lifetime ago, lit up during the festival)

McEwan Hall At The Fringe

EIFF 2026 – First Zone

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EIFF 2026 – First Zone (De Eerste Zone),
Directed by Thom Lunshof,
Starring Hadewych Minis, Violet Braeckman, Oona De Kok, Aus Greidanus Jr.

Fenna (Hadewych Minis) is living alone, in what looks like an industrial cathedral, which actually turns out to be an enormous offshore wind turbine, one of the few structures still above the waters in this post-climate change world. The Netherlands has always had a precarious relationship with the sea – historically a powerful maritime nation through much of European history, the sea has brought this small nation riches and trading links and influence across the globe. But with so much of the Netherlands lying below sea level, it is also enormously vulnerable to rising sea levels, with even the ingenious systems of dykes, damns, land reclaimed from the seas and more in a constant battle against nature.

In Lunshof’s First Zone, that battle has finally been lost – climate change and higher sea levels have finally overwhelmed the country, leaving a number of “zones” in various stages of flooding, where the small remaining population tries to survive.

Fenna is in Zone 1, entirely alone in her wind turbine castle – there’s an early scene during a storm where we hear someone banging on the steel door to the turbine and begging for help, but she just stand warily on the inside, doing nothing. It’s never entirely clear if there really was someone outside, or if the noises and voices were all in her head, , hallucinations from PTSD and survivor’s guilt (outside there is nothing except more sea and the odd other turbine, so perhaps the voices were imaginary?). Even if not real, it does serve to demonstrate how isolated from humanity Fenna has become. Silent for the most part, she’s simply in survival mode at any cost, no-one else counts.

Of course, she wasn’t always this way. We see her periodically open a hatch and descend into a flooded part of the turbine structure, just floating there, like an isolation tank, sometimes stroking a small box she wears on a chain around her neck, and there are flashbacks to the pre-flood world, a normal home, children, happiness. When something goes wrong with the hatch during a storm, she is forced out of the underwater exit, directly into the raging sea, and taken far from her isolated home, waking up to find she has been fished from the sea by a family group with numerous children, living on a large boat.

This is the start of Fenna’s travels, as she tries to traverse the various zones to head back to her home. She is still quiet, rarely speaking, and very wary and distrustful of any person she meets (she has been alone a long time), no matter how much they try to help her or how friendly they seem to be. On this journey she encounters numerous people, some kind, some hostile, but the one she spends the most time with is Ive (Violet Braeckman), who is the opposite of the stoic, suspicious Fenna, being open, cheerful and friendly, and, as you might imagine in this kind of story, the unusual partnership starts to have an affect of Fenna (although this is no sugar-coated, sweet tale, this is still a fierce, hard fight for survival for all of them in a world changed forever).

While the story may become slightly repetitive as Fenna encounters one group, leaves, heads to the next zone and meets more, repeat, I think that’s actually part of the point: there is no big scene or sudden action or revelation here, it is a slow-paced hard battle to remain alive in this world. Cinematographer Sami El Hassani fills the screen with some amazing visuals, from the industrial Gothic of the part submerged turbine to wide landscape/seascape vistas, all shot using real-world Dutch locations, which adds some verisimilitude to the scenario.

EIFF 2026 - First Zone 02
(director Thom Lunshof (right), with actors Hadewych Minis (left) and Violet Braeckman (centre) at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival, talking with the Filmhouse audience. Images from my Flickr, click on the pics for the larger versions)

EIFF 2026 - First Zone 03

It isn’t all just seascapes either, there are little plots of low-lying land still just above the water, where some eke out a living, and then shallows, barely waist-deep, filled with water-based foliage, traversed by wooden walkways (reminiscent of the Fens in the UK). Nico Maas’s superb, low-fi soundtrack – slightly reminiscent of slide-guitar king Ry Cooder, especially his Paris, Texas music – fits El Hassani’s visuals perfectly. Combining these visuals and soundscape with solid performances from Minis and Braeckman, and you have a slow-burn but compelling tale, in a setting that’s dangerously close to being real and not just fantasy. A tale not just of survival, but of what we can easily lose – our shared humanity – if survival becomes our only goal, because survival is not the same as living.

First Zone was a World Premiere at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2026 – Hungry

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EIFF 2026 – Hungry
Directed by James Nunn,
Starring Madison Davenport, Tracey Bonner, Joaquim de Almeida, Michel Curiel, Samantha Coughlan, Olivia Bernstone, Jim Meskimen, River Codack

This was part of the Midnight Madness where, as the film festival organisers put it, we watch “f**ked up movies”, and the “Hungry” is, as some of you will have guessed, is as in the old family game “Hungry Hungry Hippos”, but of course they can’t use that title for their movie (which does indeed feature ravenous hippos!), so hence “Hungry”. We’ve had sharks, giant snakes, crocs and gators and piranhas, but this time, down in the deepest bayou country, there are feral hippopotami!!

Yes, angry, feral hippos – local legend in the swamplands around New Orleans holds that in the early twentieth century, there was a problem with cattle, so someone had the bright idea to import hippopotami from Africa, with an idea they’d be better suited to the conditions in the state, then breed them for slaughter. But that’s just a legend, right? Right?

Sistine (Madison Davenport) is trying to have a break with her bestie, Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) in New Orleans. Struggling to look after her ill mother, pay the mounting medical bills and hold down a job with a jerk employer (who phones her for work during her holiday, yes, he is that big a swine). Hannah meets Rodrigo (Michel Curiel) and his boss Walker (veteran actor Joaquim de Almeda), who runs swamp tours, with guaranteed views of the state’s alligators, and she decides to book the pair of them on the tour to distract Sistine (who isn’t keen on it, but is talked into it).

Next morning, hungover, they join the tour, alongside a family group and a lone businesswoman, Dionne (Tracey Bonner). Unknown to all aboard, Dionne has promised her kids a photo of the biggest alligator in the swamps, but this means going off the usual routes for tour boats, so she covertly bribes Rodrigo, who is in charge of the boat, to take them to a likely site. Luckily for them the biggest alligator is geo-tagged, so they can focus in easily on his location… Except he isn’t there. What they don’t know, but we do because it was in the opening sequence, was we saw a giant gator hunting in the swamps, only to be ambushed by something bigger and more powerful…

They soon find their gator – well, bits of it. And they are understandably worried about what the hell could take down such an enormous apex predator in its own environment? And, well, I’m pretty sure that those of you who, like me, enjoy a fun creature feature will guess what happens next – there’s an attack by a largely unseen something, they are stranded, the fact they are well off the normal tour boat route so not likely to be spotted easily comes out among recriminations, and people start being picked off…

Like I said, I think most of us know how this is going to go, the numbers are going to be reduced, one by one, there will be sudden threats and the equally sudden relief of that tension when they survive, at least until the next incident. Plans to help themselves if no rescue turn up are formulated, ideas exchanged, and meanwhile they know they are in constant mortal danger. The game now becomes who will make it through and who is going to be chomped??

There’s the usual roster of characters, the ones you like and root for to survive, the ones you suspect will die in some sort of heroic attempt to save them all, and of course there are ones you think deserve to be chomped up. Walker a hunter as well as tour guide, is an obvious stand-in for Quint from Jaws, and delights in telling them that hippos are mostly vegetarian, and they’re not trying to eat you for food, like most predators, they are doing it for fun!

So no, other than being hippos, there isn’t a lot new in this creature feature, but it’s not trying to pretend it is rewriting the sub-genre, it’s rolling with it, and it is inviting us to roll with it too. This is made by people who clearly love a good monster movie, know the rules, know what we expect, and are happy to serve it up. It may not break any moulds, but it knows what it is doing, and who its audience is – this is one to watch, late evening, with your friends and some pizza and food and just laugh and shriek, and enjoy it. I think my only surprise here was, that despite a number of kills, the gore level is fairly low, but then it does feel like they’re going for an uncomplicated, fun beast feature.

Hungry will appear on Sky Cinema in September

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2026 – The Peril at Pincer Point

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EIFF 2026 – The Peril at Pincer Point,
Directed by Jake Kuhn, Noah Stratton-Twine,
Starring Alyth Ross, Dashiell Upton, Isobel Laidler, Jack Redmayne, Jason Hogan, Mat Wright, Mike Mackenzie, Oliver Woolf, Os Leanse

Now here we a delightful wee oddity – and I use the word “oddity” as a positive one. Peril is one of that small but hugely fun trend of really independent movies, the type made by a bunch of friends working together, using whatever money they can scrape together and whatever resources and locations they can get a hold of. Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) is a sound designer with problems – he’s a bit shallow but desperate to make his mark in “the industry” (he loves telling everyone he meets he’s “in the industry”), but his colleagues are giving him a rough time over his work so far, which falls short of what the legendary director PW (Os Leanse), is looking for.

Oh, and despite living in the upper levels of a multi-storey flat in London, he finds a crab lurking under his sofa. Which gives him a nasty nip.

After a stormy meeting with Jim’s colleagues, PW sees him and declares he’s the man he need – to the surprise of the same colleagues who had been telling him how bad his earlier efforts were. But PW thinks he sees a kindred soul, someone who will go that extra mile to help him realise his vision. And what’s his vision? Well he wants some sort of sound that’s never been heard before. Oh sure, that’s easy to find and record…

PW also wants the voice of the “sandwich girl” from a previous production, and so Jim is dispatched with his recording equipment to the tiny island of Pincer Point, to find this vague sound PW craves and to find the girl and persuade her to be recorded too. Easy, right?? Except the girl has vanished, and the island is populated by a range of bizarre, oddball characters – imagine some of the odder background characters from Spaced or the village in Hot Fuzz, and the girl, Marina (Alyth Ross) has vanished. And the man, Hollis (co-director Stratton-Twine), who is renting him a place to stay on the island turns out to be the brother of the missing girl.

Not that many seem that bothered about her being missing – in fact Hollis, the town drunk, seems more put out that Jim came to record his sister and not him (“I can do a woman” he complains). In time-honoured tradition he finds out bits and pieces from local characters, such as an old sea dog in the pub, or from Hollis. They all point to an old legend, of Sye Telson, who selects certain people to join his crew for ten thousand years, taking their very souls. And apparently Jim is just the type the captain likes…

 

This was such a good-natured hoot – funny and warm, making the most from its tiny budget, indeed often making something inventive and great out of the lack of big resources. In many ways it reminded me of other Indie flicks I have really enjoyed in recent years, like the fabulous Hundreds of Beavers. And like that film, on hearing the cast and crew talking about it after the screening, you get the impression they had as much fun making this as we had watching it, and that permeates this tiny budget, British indie flick. This is one to watch with a bunch of friends.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman

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EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman,
Directed by Bart Simpson,
Featuring Adele Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, Gareth Gaudin, James Warren, Karen Green, Matt Groening, Meredith Kurtzman, Nellie Kurtzman, Pete Poplaski, Robert Crumb, Sarah Downs, Sergio Aragones, Terry Gilliam, William Stout

I usually find some interesting documentary work to watch during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and this year I found one which dovetailed rather nicely with my own passions – comics. A film about a gifted and influential comics creator. That’s two of my favourite things in one, so of course I booked tickets to this Canadian-Scottish production.

For those unfamiliar with his name, Kurtzman was an incredibly inventive comics artist and writer and publisher. Some of his early work would involve a lot of research (despite the fairly fast and cheap nature of the medium at the time) to get details and ideas correct, especially for his war comics. These were not like most other rah-rah, here are our boys, the Good Guys, valiantly facing and vanquishing the Nasty Enemy. For starters these were aimed at much older readers, not kids, and Kurtzman managed to work in an anti-war sensibility while delivering the story, the sort of remarkable trick Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun would pull off decades later with the influential Charley’s War; no honour and glory antics here, this was war as hell and the effect is had on those who made it back.

Kurtzman started convincing the iconic EC Comics to start looking at new directions, not just their war, crime and horror titles, and his incredibly inventive sense of humour, combined with his distaste for those in authority, would really start to manifest (although some who knew him said this was already apparent when he drew cartoons even at high school). The road to the now-iconic MAD magazine was laid, and entire generations of creative talents would grow up influenced by this.


(restored version of the first MAD Magazine cover)

Simpson assembles some terrific talking heads scenes with people who knew Kurtzman, not least his youngest daughter, Nellie, who is a frequent “anchor” figure through the film, often talking with an old friend of her father’s, and a well-known name in comics circles in his own right, Denis Kitchen, who has carefully archived so much of Kurtzman’s work, and as they go through this material – from published work to personal notes and letters, we get more insight into Kurtzman’s varied output across the decades, while an animation studio took some of the artwork and brought it to a simple but effective form of life, to make it more visually engaging than simply showing a number of static images.

Another framing device used to structure the film is an old Canadian talk-show broadcast with Harvey, which, as director Simpson explained, allowed Harvey, gone now for some decades, to speak for himself about his work and his motivations. Around this and Nellie and Kitchen, we get quite the array of others who knew or worked with Kurtzman, including names from succeeding generations of creatives who would go on to become huge, influential names themselves, such as Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, not to mention Terry Gilliam and Matt Groening.


(cover for Help! Magazine number 1, with comedian Sid Caesar on the cover, the first of a string of famous figures who would gladly grace the pages)

Gilliam particularly is full of praise, and not just for the encouragement and work Harvey gave him when he was starting out, in Help! Magazine, but the connections – for a while they were playing with the photo-comic idea, but giving it their own subversive twist. One of the young actors used in such a strip, a man who falls for his daughter’s Barbie doll, was played by a very young John Cleese. As Gilliam notes, if he hadn’t had this comics connection to Cleese through working with Kurtzman, would he have travelled to the UK to become part of Monty Python? Would he have had the film career he had afterwards?

For me one of the warmest parts of this film wasn’t just those who knew or worked with Kurtzman reminiscing about him, it was about the influence, that ineffable effect where someone often doesn’t even know they are doing it, but they are passing on influences to a new generation, who take it and run with it, doing their own new things, which in turn influence more that come after them. With the run on Help! Magazine publishing early works from the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, who would go on to be pivotal figures in the emerging underground comics scene and the wider counter culture (as indeed did Kurtzman’s work). Or his teaching spell, alongside the equally legendary Will Eisner, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, frequently bringing in established creators as guests to his class.

There’s even a nice segment of Kurtzman in Europe, where his approach to comics and satire for adult readers inspired many in the Franco-Belgian comics scene. It was especially interesting to me as today in English-language countries, although the comics form is treated better than before, most comics creators here envy the way the medium is treated as a proper part of the arts scene in the Franco-Belgian world, so it was interesting to hear of a time when that influence was coming the other way and inspiring creators like Gotlib and Moebius.

EIFF 2026 - The MAD World of Harvey Kurtzman 03
(Director Bart Simpson talking with the Edinburgh film fest crowd in the Cameo, after the screening of the Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, pic from my Flick)

And the nice thing about that influence is that, long after we lose the artist – or for Nellie and her family, they lost a loving father and husband, and too early – is that the influence remains, streamed into newer generations of creators, who in turn influence other, younger, newer creators, and so it goes on, a living influence. A warm-hearted look at not just a great comics creator and humorist, but a creator who genuinely influenced the popular and then the counter cultures (there’s a reason Steven Spielberg paid top dollar for a framed early MAD cover by Kurtzman, now, ironically, worth far more than he ever got paid in his own lifetime); today one of the major comics industry awards is named for Kurtzman, another way his legacy continues.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films