A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story
When I heard they were making a miniseries about the last woman executed in England I decided then and there that there would be no way I would watch this series. It would be too depressing. And then I decided to drop my BritBox subscription. I will never let a single day go to waste with a streaming subscription so I started to look for short shows to fill in this two week gap. After exhausting all the Agatha Christie I hadn't yet watched and hearing rave reviews about A Cruel Love, I caved. I blame Bessie Carter. I can do four episodes of about anything so I should have been able to handle this. Well, I should have stuck to my gut instincts. This was beyond depressing. A sort of fever dream of domestic abuse filmed with an almost Lynchian glamour of a woman battered and bloody and bruised. Yet there felt like there wasn't any grounding in reality. They just showed little vignettes of Ruth's life and her love affair with her "victim" David Blakely. Though I think "love" is a stretch. There was no love, cruel or otherwise here, it was people colliding into, using, and destroying each other in whatever way they could. The show seems to be wanting to say that it was the unspoken rules of society that Ruth dared to breach by aiming to better her life that lead to her death, which, while partially true, in that it lead to her being railroaded at trial, doesn't take into account her upbringing at all. She was raised to believe that all she deserved from life was abuse. She suffered at the hands of her father and then all her lovers, even the one "good guy" who basically turned this broken woman into a killer. And yet this is all told elliptically. In little flashes. The horrors of her childhood are mentioned in a throwaway line from her sister, who it should be noted was another victim of men having been raped and impregnated by their father. I just felt like this REAL LIFE STORY has something so important to say. It changed the law, as she was the last woman executed, and within a decade the death penalty was abolished. And yet the weight isn't there. It's more snippets of her degradation while still looking glamorous. There's no real history, what history I read about was thanks to the internet, and seriously, someone has to get onto how Ruth's mother was connected to the Cambridge Five. Now that's a true crime show I do want to watch. But this. This was a woman whose life was destroyed by men and her story is told and controlled by men. She doesn't really factor in until the end. She's about an eye for an eye and a stiff upper lip and not showing how her repeated abuse, her trauma, is what led her to this desperate act. She doesn't want to be seen as a victim and that is exactly how abusers get away with their crimes. They make their victims carry the blame and shame. Only at the end does she realize that she was sticking to a morality the others weren't playing by and by then it's too late to save herself. But maybe that's what makes this work, on some level, at least in the eyes of the reviewers who raved, because it was men who controlled, ruined, and then ended her life, and therefore, it's not really about her, it's about the patriarchy. Personally, I think it should have been about Ruth. But maybe I'm alone in this assessment.
Even if you've never watched it all Anglophiles are aware of Death in Paradise, the Caribbean based murder mystery with a revolving door of leads. In fact, the series created by Robert Thorogood is so popular that he has written four books and co-created two spinoffs, Beyond Paradise and Return to Paradise, AKA The Paraverse, and no, I didn't make that up. One of which I will never watch due to my hatred of a certain actor. Which might also be why I've never watched the original show despite Danny John-Jules being in it. When it was announced back in 2020 that Robert Thorogood was writing a new book series it was inevitably going to be a television series. There literally was no doubt. Proven even more by the fact that before season one had even aired a second season had been commissioned. I really wanted to like this show, I mean Samantha Bond was in my favorite adaptation of Mansfield Park and most recently was on Downton Abbey, and Jo Martin is the Fugitive Doctor! I mean, right there, two classy ladies. The problem is this show felt more like it belonged on BritBox or Acorn, not PBS. Now this isn't to slam these two wonderful streaming services, or to point out that most of Robert Thorogood's shows now are through BritBox, this was just a gut feeling I had when watching the show. To be worthy of being on Masterpiece Mystery!, or as I still call it, Mystery!, you kind of have to be a classic. This is the home of Holmes and Rumpole, Morse and Campion, Lynley and Foyle, Lewis and Wallander, Miss Scarlet and Atticus Pünd, and I'm sorry, Judith Potts isn't worthy. Not even going into the fact that she's completely unlikable, because you can connect to cantankerous and churlish detectives, she's just flat. Her character feels like a non-character. She's ostensibly the lead and she just falls short. When her life is in danger I actually wanted her to die. I knew she wouldn't because of the aforementioned renewal, but she and her swimming about in the Thames could have come to a messy end and I wouldn't have cared. And I don't know if it's how she's written, but it felt like Samantha Bond was phoning it in. Like she would just show up and kind of woodenly deliver her performance and call it a day. But it's obvious this show really doesn't care what you think about the characters, because there are several people in Marlow who need to be culled over the coming seasons. Starting with DS Perry. Though really, so much of this could have been overlooked if it was tightly plotted and believable. When the ending is revealed it's so ludicrously bad that I almost couldn't believe it. For awhile I thought that Judith Potts's evil ex was going to make an appearance, but they're apparently saving him for later, instead this was even stupider than what I thought possible. It was Strangers on a Train but with three killers and they all knew each other from school but hadn't seen each other in years. Despite living in the same town. Which has a population of 14,000 people. FFS. They deserved to be caught even if Judith Potts and Co. didn't deserve to catch them.
The very first thing I thought when I heard about this series was; "Can Jason Isaacs do the voice?" Because if he couldn't nail that studied yet somehow relaxed transatlantic accent there was literally no point to this miniseries. And the trailers they released didn't really confirm or deny this. Therefore I went into Archie blind with my fingers crossed. And somehow, I don't know how, Jason Isaacs did it. He pulled it off. You believed him to be Cary Grant, especially the older greying Cary. You were able to suspend disbelief for a few hours and learn about this very secretive man. Because Cary Grant was a secretive man. He believed his life was his life. He might have been a celebrity, one might even say one of the greatest stars ever, but no one really knew him. There were the rumors, was he gay? What about his drug use? And I give props to this series for not dodging any of those questions. They weren't interested in making a puff piece, they were interested in showing some truth, be it flattering or, well, not at all complimentary. The controlling Cary if you will. You came out feeling as if you really did know Cary Grant. Or at least more than you knew before. But you also have to keep in mind that having this based on Dyan Cannon's memoir you're getting it through the filter of her experiences. Therefore making sense of the fact that the best cast character on this show was Dyan's. Laura Aikman as Dyan isn't about suspending disbelief, it's about seeing Dyan living and breathing in this show. It was eerie to say the least. But by having Dyan kind of being the lens through which we see Cary my Dad who I was watching this with assumed that Dyan was the love of Cary's life and that they rode off into the sunset together, which isn't the case. At all. Dyan was Grant's fourth wife and their marriage only last three years. Which wasn't his shortest marriage, but it was far from his longest. But the importance of Dyan is that she brought Cary's only child into the world. Jennifer Grant became Cary's whole world. She was born in 1966 and after her birth he stopped acting. He was at the height of his career and he ended it to be a father. Which is the most amazing thing. He found the love he'd spent his life looking for. Because this show does a supreme job of showing the horrors her grew up with, the deprivation, the lies, the love he sought. He thought his mother was dead until he was thirty-one and found out his father had had her institutionalized when Cary was nine so that he could start a new family. The poor Archie Leach used vaudeville as his ticket to America and remade himself. Everything about his life was constructed. If there's one thing this show shows you is that the greatest role Cary Grant ever played was that of Cary Grant. To think that this man, this man who was always acting, was then an actor, it's astonishing the depths to which he was about reinvention. You might find him not as perfect as you'd hoped he was, but you will come away with awe at what he did.
Earlier this year I watched all the episodes of Endeavour that have currently been released. The biggest joy of watching the prequel to Inspector Morse is Roger Allam as Fred Thursday. So obviously once I had watched all the episodes of Endeavour I started having severe Roger Allam withdrawal. The Morse withdrawals were staved off by moving directly onto an Inspector Morse rewatch. Thankfully BritBox came to the rescue for all my Allam needs with the timely release of Murder in Provence, an adaptation of the Verlaque and Bonnet series by M.L. Longworth. Allam is still firmly in the crime solving genre, but he's traded in his trademark mac and fedora for blue suits and skies. And as for his day of the week sandwiches? They have been upgraded to fresh seafood and delectable French cuisine. This is a series as much about the lifestyle of Provence as it is about the crime solving. Which brings me to one of the main criticisms of the show by reviewers, and that's it's a show about France, set in France, and yet where are the French actors? It's like the stable of British actors who appear in murder mysteries were just given trips to Provence instead of French actors being found. And while yes, I can agree with this criticism, I have two rejoinders, it could have been worse, with the British actors putting on French accents, and Roger Allam. This show got made because of his star power. It's not blind luck that this show actually crashed BritBox when it premiered. This wouldn't have happened with a French cast, which is just a sad truth. But seeing so many actors who have been on Endeavour and Father Brown in different roles with their old costars is just comforting. Which is what this show is, a comforting murder mystery, with a little more style and substance than most. Though what I really connected to was the relationship of Antoine Verlaque and Marine Bonnet as played by Roger Allam and Nancy Carroll respectively. They are an older couple who are unmarried and yet have a fruitful relationship surrounded by quirky friends and family. I defy you not to love Marine's communist mother and Didier Laurent AKA Dirk Gently by another name. But going back to their mature relationship, they have real conversations, about health issues like prostates and menopause. And yes, I feel like it ages me saying that these conversations add some weight to the show, but it's refreshing seeing these subjects handled in a matter of fact way amongst all the other issues of a crime solving life. Even if Nancy Carroll is far younger than you would guess!
I've been a fan of Hayley Atwell's for what seems like forever, but looking at her credits it's been about fifteen years starting with the Sally Lockhart films. But it was her portrayal of Agent Carter, giving us a non-superpowered kick-ass female lead in the male dominated Marvel universe that forever made me a fan. That and her hilarious lip-synch videos and self-deprecating social media presence. So I was aware of The Long Song since the day it first started filming back in 2018. And since the day later in 2018 that it aired in England. Nowadays with shows being shown almost simultaneously stateside thanks to premium cable channels and services like BritBox I kept waiting for The Long Song to finally air here. And I waited. And I waited. Seriously, Howards End with Hayley's portrayal of Margaret Schlegel ran on Starz and even re-aired TWICE on PBS and still I waited for The Long Song. Until finally it was announced as part of Masterpiece's 51st season. I would finally get to see the adaptation of Andrea Levy's book! And ironically, considering how long I waited to see this, I think now was the perfect time for it to air. Right when America finally said enough and embraced Black Lives Matter on a scale it should have always been embraced it's more important than ever to look back and see the horrors of what we have done in the past. To not flinch away from uncomfortable truths. And the truth of the matter is Hayley is nothing more than odious comic relief, as she should be in this setting. As she herself said "I play a heinous, vile old cow [as] Variety reviews my portrayal: 'an actor who typically radiates warmth, does a remarkable job of curdling the atmosphere of every room unlucky enough to have Caroline in it.'" The real star is Tamara Lawrance as July. A slave who was taken away from her mother to be a plaything for Caroline. Who, despite everything, is a source of joy. Her life keeps beating her down again and again yet she is a "joyous survivor" as one reviewer said. And that's the heart of The Long Song, showing the horrors unflinchingly but celebrating the joy of surviving and creating a better world.
