22
NAVY NEWS, MAY 1993
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How to tackle problems from another angle FORGET The Terminator. Forget Lethal Weapon. They're reduced to small potatoes when measured against this month's big subject. Yes, we're talking about the sport — or art — of fly fishing . . . It all starts with Norman Maclean, a retired professor of English who decided in his 70s to write his first book. What emerged was an autobiographical tale about growing up in the nineteen tens and twenties in the semi-wilderness of Montana. It told the story of his family. Scottish immigrants, headed by an u n b e n d i n g Presbyterian minister of a father and completed by a younger brother as recklessly hell-bent as Norman himself was inherently cautious; and of how all the family tensions and bitterness were dissolved in their mutual love of fishing. The book — A River Runs Through It — became a best-seller and soon Hollywood came calling. The author though, being old and comfortably off, and perhaps mindful of the degree of aggravation a film production can generate, turned them all down. However Robert Redford, himself of Scottish descent, had fallen in love with the book and through much of the 1980s gently prodded the author, finally cpming up with a screenplay which met with his approval. Now, finally, we can see the result of Redford's persistence. It's a leisurely, satisfying tale, a sort of anti-soap opera, in that instead of relentlessly "talking
out" every problem in sight, the Macleans were a family who a p p r o a c h e d c o n f l i c t s
Screen Scene obliquely or ignored them together. Visually it's magnificent, with the characters moving through a landscape of great soaring cliffs and forests that seem to go on forever. But it's the theme of fishing which makes the film so memorable. According to Maclean Sr., fly fishing is "an art performed on a four-count rhythm between 10 and 2 o'clock." You have to see the film to know what he's talking about, but by the end one can believe that there is no problem that won't radically diminish after a few hours by the river, casting some artful assembly of thread and feathers, hoping to seduce some big old trout into coming up and taking a bite. The only discordant note in
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all this harmony is that Norman Maclean himself did not live to see the picture. His phi-
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lospphy, though — more Buddhist than Christian — survives in the film, spoken by Redford himself: "Eventually everything merges into pne, and a river runs through it ... I am haunted by waters." Recent a d d i t i o n s to the RNFC Video Library include Prisoners of Honour, a reconstruction of the famous Dreyfus scandal which rocked French society at the turn of the century. Determined to confuse us all, the film's producers have cast Richard Dreyfus, not as his namesake, but as an army lawyer who gradually realises that the cashiered captain banged up on Devil's Island has been comprehensively framed. Ken Russell directs, for once, in a matter-of-fact, non-sensational
style. Confusion of a different sort reigns in Cool World, a partanimated, part-live action farrago concerning an artist who turns into a drawing and tumbles into his own comic strip, while one of his creations, a lissome lovely, metamorphoses into Kim Bassinger and slips into the real world. The plot probably defies all comprehension but at least there's plenty to engage the eye, not least Ms. Bassinger herself. Lastly, a comedy which positively revels in confusion: Noises Off is a film about the staging of a play, one of those bedroom farces in which the characters totally misunderstand everything that's happening around them. The qn-stage chaos mirrors that behind the scenes, as the production tours the States, and Sod's law goes into overdrive. The starry cast of the film that is headed by Michael Caine as a director heading inexorably towards a nervous breakdown. — Bob Baker
Above: Craig Sheffer as Norman Maclean and Brad Pitt as his younger brother fly fishing on the Great Blackfoot River, a still from A River Runs Through It.
SACRIFICIAL LAMB OUTLIVES THE KNIFE-WELDERS MUTINY or disaffection? The business at Invergordon in September 1931 may have come close to the former, though the latter is the label the Navy preferred thereafter.
forebore from any drastic action. He decided against visiting individual ships to make a personal appeal to allow
It is a measure of the embarrassment it caused that Rear-Admiral Wilfred Tomkinson, who found himself suddenly in command of the Atlantic Fleet owing to the sudden illness of Admiral Sir Michael Hodges, was later censured by those who initially supported his action — or rather lack of it — in defusing the crisis. Many of his so-called friends at the Admiralty thought he should have turned his ship's guns on the mutineers — but Tomkinson, who more or less allowed the trouble to fizzle out of its own accord, may have thereby prevented a national revolt much more serious than the General Strike, according to Alan Coles in Invergordon Scapegoat (Alan Sutton, £14.99).
Backbiting
Responsibilities It came about through the announcement of pay cuts proposed by the newlyformed National Government as a desperate measure to help balance the budget. Warnings of possible unrest were issued to the Admiralty — but not passed on to Tomkinson, who was distracted by his sudden responsibilities for the Fleet that was shortly to engage in large-scale exercises. Details of the cuts were poorly communicated to the men and as they began to gather on the forecastles of the ships, noisily resentful and refusing to carry out ordinary harbour work, Tomkinson wisely
looked into "with view to necessary alleviation being made" they all sailed within a few hours. Shortly afterward Tomkinson was promoted Vice-Admiral — but in almost the same breath the Admiralty cut short his promotion as Commander of the 2nd Battle Cruiser Squadron and in a separate communication delivered their verdict on his responsibility for Invergordon — "If the situation had been well handled on those two days, instead of being allowed to drift, Their Lordships consider it improbable that this outbreak would ever have occurred."
the fleet to sail — because he was "practically unknown" to them and thus unable to rely on his personality to influence the men until he had a definite assurance from the Admiralty that the grievances would be investigated. After their Lordships, in response to a last warning signal from Tomkinson, directed that the ships should proceed to their home ports so the matter could be
The backbiting and jockeying for position behind the scenes that underlay their decision — which spelled the end of Tomkinson's peacetime career — does not make pleasant reading. He spent months trying to clear his name — with the earnest support of Roger Keyes, whose loyalty to an erstwhile protege was characteristic — but found that many of his former friends had turned on him. He was recalled during the war and spent three years as Flag Officer Bristol before a bout of pneumonia forced a second and final retirement. His children distinguished themselves in this period and there was further poetic justice for Tomkinson in that he outlived all his detractors, dying at the age of 94 in 1971 — 40 years after the events that, according to several letters in the Times, many still believed had caused him to be "sacrificed on the Admiralty's High Altar." — JFA