A voice to savour: review of Supporting Features by Damien Love

Review by Peter Ross

DAMIEN Love, the Sunday Herald television critic, is a journalist whose writing offers as pleasurable an aesthetic experience, sometimes more so, as the subjects about which he writes. He has a knack for striking physical description. Who can forget his image of Strictly judge Len Goodman’s “ration-book eyes”? Or here he is on archive footage of Stevie Smith reading her poem Not Waving, But Drowning: “In the centre of the room there stands a large old armchair and, in the centre of the armchair, there sits a small woman of indeterminate age – in her 60s, yet suggesting a schoolgirl drawn by Edward Gorey – gazing up from under the fringe of her bob with eyes black and watery, glinting both with wicked mischief and angry sadness.”

A lamentable tendency has developed in British journalism over the last 20 years for writing that, lacking style and personality, functions as a mere delivery mechanism for the content. Love belongs to the older critical tradition of Clive James, Kenneth Tynan and Ian Nairn – intellectual and literary but never bloodless, never boring. Once you know his voice, you can recognise it without checking the byline. In a decently ordered society, his work would be read out in town squares by liveried cryers, but this is 21st-century Scotland, where, alas, one need not spend long hunting for snark; newspaper columns bulge with the stuff. Love’s copy, by contrast, comes from a journalist who is well named – full of passion and compassion.

Supporting Features is a collection of his writing on film. Half of the book consists of Q&A interviews with cultish figures including Harry Dean Stanton and Roger Corman; the other half gathers pieces on moviemakers such as Marlene Dietrich and Robert Mitchum. The style is often appropriately hard-boiled and noir-ish. “September 19, 1932. The LAPD got the call around mid-morning. The guy wanted to remain anonymous. They usually do.” That’s how the book begins, an account of the suicide of Peg Entwhistle, the failing starlet who jumped from the H of the Hollywood sign. Sightings of her ghost, Love writes, are said to be accompanied by the smell of gardenia, the perfume she favoured. We catch a trace of this revenant scent in the book’s final piece, a fantasy about an unmade Jack Nicholson film, in which his Chinatown character Jake Gittes smells it, fleetingly, in the Los Angeles night.

Between these two stories are 500 or so pages of damn fine writing. To call it criticism is not quite enough. Love has created a world, a mood, all dames-in-trouble and neon-in-puddles, and peopled it with real movie-makers. “He carried unspoken stories on his face, and once you’d recognised his face, you couldn’t ignore it.” Love pens those words about the great American character actor Warren Oates, but one could say the same about his own work. He is the best writer on film and TV in Scotland, probably in Britain, and he deserves star billing.