10 Things #17

GH on a failing league, a forgotten movie, and a fab exhibition.

1/ The Third Test starts tonight, a dead rubber.  Zimbabwe is looking outmatched by Ireland in Belfast, a sad commentary.  

2/ Major League Cricket, meanwhile, is oozing money and celebrity.  Thus the story of our times?   It’s a story, certainly.  But this, by Andrew Fidel Fernando, is also a story, that of the dwindling of the Lanka Premier League.  Sri Lanka loves cricket; it’s embraced T20Is.  But franchise cricket not so much.  The Sri Lanka Premier League, then the Super 4s both floundered; after starting promisingly, the LPL has muddled along, but now finds itself in competition for calendar space and cricket talent with MLC.  Jason Behrendorff, Australia’s T20 Player of the Year, gave up his WA contract for opportunities like this - desultory attendances, few sponsors, a general air of seediness. At least he ended up on the winning side.

3/ In the reckoning that is surely coming for cricket calendar space, the competition is not merely between international and franchise cricket - it is between top-, second- and third-tier attractions.  We might see not just a recalibration in the proportions of the formats but a remaking of cricket’s map.  Kumar Sangakkara shrugged his shoulders recently when asked how he would feel if Sri Lanka ceased to play Test cricket.  How would he feel were cricket itself to dwindle away there?

4/ While marooned in London recently with a spare few hours, I thought to take in an old movie, and settled on an sf favourite: Joe Sargent’s Colossus the Forbin Project (1970).  You’d pardoned having missed it.  Universal Studios apparently planned Colossus as their response to the success of MGM’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), then threw their promotional weight instead behind their adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s Airport (1970), leaving Sargent’s film to sink without trace.  But Colossus, based on a 1966 novel by Dennis Feltham Jones, has gone onto enjoy a cult afterlife - a favourite, for example, of Spielberg, who as a tyro director at Universal made a point of visiting the set daily.  And as an anticipation of the dystopian possibilities of artificial intelligence meshed with the surveillance state, it stands up better than well.  If you can overlook the antique conceptions of computing power, which make no concessions to Moore’s Law, it’s smart, suspenseful, and, dare one say, prescient.

5/ Colossus was an advance in the filmic representation of technology even in 1970.  In Failsafe (1964), the computer had failed; in 2001, the computer had gone crazy; in Colossus, the computer did exactly what it was told.  Colossus is a giant sentient supercomputer designed by the US to protect it from the Soviet nuclear threat.  When activated, however, it becomes aware of a counterpart in the USSR, Guardian, in the same role.  And so, to execute their joint mission, Colossus and Guardian join forces to terrify humanity into submission.  

6/ Over the objections of the studio, who were leaning to a Charlton Heston or a Gregory Peck to play Colossus’s inventor Dr Charles Forbin, producer Stanley Chase plumped for a relatively unknown lead, Hans Gudegast - a young German who had come to the US as a schoolboy athlete, won a scholarship to Montana State University, and settled into a comfortable Hollywood groove playing Nazis. Universal’s Lew Wasserman agreed on condition Gudegast replace his Teutonic name.  So Eric Braeden he became, and to the role of Forbin he brings a wonderfully cool European sensibility, at first regarding his invention’s caprices with paternal indulgence, then almost enjoying their duels.  Only gradually does he grasp that Colossus is observing, learning and anticipating his every move.  

7/ The ending, I think, is especially good.  Where Godard, for example, lets the audience off the hook in Alphaville (1965), allowing the supercomputer Alpha 60 to be cornily defeated by his rumpled hero Lemmy Caution, Sargent exposes Forbin to the full consequences of his handiwork.  As a central casting US president complete with JFK pompadour, Canadian Gordon Pinsent is also note perfect.

8/ A word, too, for Colossus itself, played by an uncredited Paul Frees, the six times-married ‘Man of a Thousand Voices’, best known to my generation as the voice of Boris Badenov in Rocky & Bullwinkle and Inspector Fenwick in Dudley Do-Right.  Enhanced by a sonic processor, Frees gives the voice the perfect intonation: flat and inhuman but eerily characterful.  Colossus’s concluding monologue is perfectly chilling, its personality more sinister than sentient successors like Zero in Rollerball (1975), Skynet in The Terminator (1984) or even Mother in Alien (1979).  Best of all: you can watch Colossus free here [see above].  As Molly would say: do yourself a favour.

9/ This weekend is also your last chance to see this terrific exhibition at Geelong Gallery, which positions the woodblock prints of Margaret Preston and Cressida Campbell in adjacent rooms so as better to savour their artistic visions.

10/ Oh, and if you’re in the neighbourhood, do drop in.