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Remembering: The Mob tailor / THE OUTFIT - Official Trailer - Only in Theaters March 18

Review

The Outfit review – Mark Rylance’s mob tailor makes the cut

This article is more than 3 years old

The Oscar-winner gives a cool, calm centre to this tightly-buttoned drama about Chicago gangsters rooting out a mole

 

Peter Bradshaw

Peter Bradshaw

Mon 14 Feb 2022 20.30 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/14/the-outfit-review-mark-rylance-mob-tailor-berlin-film-festival-2022

 

The title has a double edge: it means a suit of clothes, and also the mob. US screenwriter and novelist Graham Moore won an Oscar for scripting The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. Now he’s made his directing debut with his own co-written screenplay: an amusingly contrived single-location suspense thriller, full of twist and counter-twist, set in 1950s Chicago (the city of Moore’s birth). It sometimes feels like a more refined, more well-spoken and well-tailored version of Reservoir Dogs, with besuited gangsters turning guns on each other in an enclosed space and a shot tough guy seething in agony from his bullet wound. But it has a heavier tread than this: owing more, maybe, to Hitchcock’s Rope.

 

Mark Rylance provides a solid centre with a typically calm, coolly composed, quietly spoken performance, often giving us an opaque and unnerving twinkle of mischief. He plays Leonard, a British tailor who left his homeland (for shadowy reasons) with nothing but his tailor’s scissors, and set up shop in Chicago. The reason he’s been able to make a success of things is that he is almost solely patronised by the local gangsters: the ageing capo is Roy Boyle (Simon Russell Beale), who runs this turf with his unreliable hothead son, Richie (Dylan O’Brien); Richie is snarlingly resentful that his old man now favours a smooth new lieutenant, Francis (Johnny Flynn).

 

These bad-mannered gangsters often order fancy suits from Leonard, but use his shop’s backroom as an HQ and hangout. Poor, sensitive Leonard has to quietly accept their boozy bullying (he’s actually fond of a drink himself) and get on with the trade about which he is passionate. It has given him a skill in sizing up men’s bodies and also their souls: he knows from the way they carry themselves what sort of people they are, and how to dress them. Leonard has a fatherly concern for his secretary, Mable (a nice performance from Zoey Deutch), who is keeping secrets from him. Things go terribly wrong when a rat in Roy Boyle’s organisation is suspected of selling them out to a rival gang and also the FBI, which has been tape-recording incriminating conversations using a device concealed with the rat’s help. Now the guys have managed to get hold of one of these tapes, and if they can play it, they will discover the bug’s location and get a fix on the rat’s identity. But what if the rat is higher up than anyone thinks?

 

In truth, the “tape” MacGuffin is a bit laboured, and the whole movie seems sometimes to be moving at about 80–90% of its required speed and energy. And there is also something stylised and slightly non-realistic about the way the nationwide mob is imagined to be an occult secret organisation called “the Outfit”, slightly different from the Cosa Nostra we already know about. But there is also a theatrical charm and composure to the performances (and once again, it’s time to marvel at the way Brit actors such as Beale and Flynn get to play Chicago tough guys). We know that these soldiers of crime are underestimating humble civilian Leonard, but it remains for us to find out what has actually been going on. It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

 

 The Outfit screened at the Berlin film festival. It’s scheduled for release on 18 March 2022 in the US and 8 April in the UK.

Terry Thomas

I say! What a bounder...The Life, sublime style and sartorial excellence of Terry Thomas the ultimate chap ...personification of the upper class cad ... the rotter’s rotter ...

 Man who makes today's rotters look an absolute shower
A tribute to Terry-Thomas, an actor who played the cad to perfection and who would have been 100 this week.
By Max Davidson7:30AM BST 15 Jul 2011 in The Telegraph /http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8638598/Man-who-makes-todays-rotters-look-an-absolute-shower.html

Terry-Thomas knew how to make an entrance. In 1928, as a 17-year-old straight out of school, he turned up for his first day of work as a clerk at Smithfield market wearing an olive-green pork pie hat, a taupe double-breasted suit decorated with a clove carnation, a multi-coloured tie and yellow gloves. He had a cigarette-holder in one hand and a silver-topped cane in the other. Stall-holders stopped and stared.
Standing out from the crowd, on screen and off, became his stock-in-trade. There have been many finer actors than Terry-Thomas, who would have been 100 this week, but very few who carved such a distinctive niche.
He was 45 by the time he made his breakthrough, playing the memorably fatuous Major Hitchcock in Private’s Progress, but after that he never looked back. He made more than 50 films, many of them comic classics. As a giver of laughter, he was out of the top drawer.
Nobody minded that he played the same character again and again. The actor and the man blended into one, a quintessentially English cocktail of dandyishness and dastardliness, done with the lightest of touches. A Terry-Thomas cameo had the insouciant charm of a P G Wodehouse novel.
To British cinema-goers of the 1950s and 1960s, he was as instantly recognisable as Kenneth Williams or Sid James. That gap-toothed smile. That scruffy moustache, like a slug on the upper lip. Those inimitable catch-phrases. “You’re an absolute shower.” “Jolly good show.” “Hard cheese.” That indefinable air of untrustworthiness…
He looked impressive. How could you not trust a man who was so immaculately turned out, from the gleaming shoes to the carnation in the button-hole? But you counted the spoons when he was gone. He was in the great English tradition of the non-gentleman posing as gentleman and coming within a whisker of pulling it off.
In his heyday, Terry-Thomas cornered the market in cads and bounders – words that are long past their sell-by date but evoke a vanished age of genteel skulduggery, where chaps did the dirty on other chaps because that was how chaps got on in life.
He was born Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens, the son of a small-time company director – several rungs down the social ladder from the upper-class characters with which he became associated. But that was all part of the fun. Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage, Sir Harry Washington-Smythe… Casting directors looking for someone to play a disreputable scion of the English aristocracy knew who to ring.
As an actor, he was typecast and, to an extent, paid the consequences. His roles in 1960s classics such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Monte Carlo or Bust were simply extensions of roles he had first played 10 years earlier, with films such as I’m All Right Jack. But it is a tribute to the skill with which Terry-Thomas honed his craft that he was in demand far beyond his natural stamping ground.
Unlike a lot of British character actors, whose style of comedy did not survive the Atlantic crossing, he was a big hit in Hollywood, playing a British Army officer in Stanley Kramer’s hit comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Jack Lemmon’s valet in How to Murder Your Wife. He also, improbably, enjoyed a cult following in France, after playing an RAF officer with a particularly luxurious moustache in La Grande Vadrouille.
There was no real malice in the man. The characters Terry-Thomas played could no more have committed murder than flown to the Moon. They were knaves rather than villains. And if you laughed at them, rather than with them, you laughed at them with affection. They were much too colourful to hate.
English fiction is littered with colourful rogues, from Shakespeare’s Falstaff to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman: chancers and charlatans who tell fib after fib but get away with them because they fib with style. With Terry-Thomas, the style derived partly from his dandyish appearance, but mainly from his distinctive Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: all affability on the surface, his face a rictus of bonhomie, all shiftiness and calculation underneath.
In a golden age for rotters – sharp-elbowed types in dodgy blazers, driving flash cars they could not afford – he was the rotter’s rotter. There were a lot of Terry-Thomases in the 1950s. They had not had good wars but, if they played their cards right, insisted on being calling Major, and wore a regimental tie at the golf club, they could enjoy a certain cachet. They could bluff for Britain. Terry-Thomas caught their affectations and insecurities to a T.
For an actor who gave pleasure to millions, he was cruelly recompensed by fate. In 1971 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His last film role came in 1978 and, for a time, he lived in obscurity and penury. A fund-raising gala raised £75,000, which helped him keep his head above water, but his last years were as distressing for his friends and family as they were for the actor himself, who died in 1990.
At least, through his screen performances, he had secured his immortality. Just as the Carry On films are remembered with an affection which is out of all proportion to their quality, so the broad-brush humour at which Terry-Thomas excelled has weathered changing fashions in comedy.
For as long as there are cads who blag their way to the best table in the restaurant, pinch their best pals’ girlfriends, and write cheques that bounce like pogo-sticks, the sight of Terry-Thomas will always raise a knowing smile. Or, as he would have put it himself: “Jolly good show.

I say! What a bounder... All dandy comic legend Terry-Thomas really liked was 'jolly eager girls'
By GRAHAM MCCANN
UPDATED: 22:44 GMT, 5 September 2008 in The Daily Mail / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1052851/I-say-What-bounder--All-dandy-comic-legend-Terry-Thomas-really-liked-jolly-eager-girls.html

Terry-Thomas, the gap-toothed comedian who found fame and fortune personifying the archetypal English bounder, was as passionate about clothes as he was about women.
His specially-made suits came from Savile Row, his shirt and ties from Jermyn Street and, at one point, even his underpants were tailor-made.
He was a great believer in the finishing touches  -  the suede shoes had to be perfect, as did his button-hole carnation, and, despite the fact that he gave up smoking at the end of World War II, he always carried a long cigarette holder as a sort of elegant personal prop.
So when in 1960, at the height of his carefully nurtured fame, he came off stage after giving a midnight charity performance at the Liverpool Odeon to discover that his most expensive holder  -  a flashy little number decorated with 42 diamonds and a gold spiral band, reputedly worth £2,000  -  had disappeared from his dressing room, he was livid.
The Liverpool police soon tracked down two of the diamonds to a local man called Alan Williams.
The other 40, however, were found inside a roll of carpet at the home of a 20-year-old, unemployed comedian called James Joseph Tarbuck.
Jimmy Tarbuck, whose 'Boom-Boom' catch phrase would soon become as famous as Terry-Thomas's 'I say!', pleaded guilty to theft and was placed on probation for two years.
At the trial, it emerged that the desperately ambitious Tarbuck had sought out Thomas before the show, begging for the chance to make an appearance.
The star, however, turned him down, pointing out that 'we have too many artistes already' and that it would be 'madness to put anybody else on'.
Thomas's snub was both typical and atypical of the man. It was typical because he fervently believed that meticulous preparation was the only way to ensure the 'really jolly good' show he always aimed to put on.
Slipping in an additional act at the last minute was definitely not the T-T way. But it was also atypical because T-T was normally the most generous of performers.
Throughout his career  -  whether on radio shows such as To Town With Terry, television's How Do You View? or films such as I'm All Right, Jack and It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World  -  if he thought a scene or sketch would be funnier if he did less and other actors did more, he'd happily trade them his best lines.
He knew what his sometimes unwitting costars did not; that what the public would go away remembering was another very funny show with that lovely Terry-Thomas in it.
Had he spent a little more time with Tarbuck, he might have recognised a fellow young comedian struggling to escape his origins, just as he himself had set about doing so enthusiastically some 40 years earlier.
But while Tarbuck made a virtue of his working class origins in Liverpool, Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens did everything possible to forget that he had been born, the fourth of five children, in 1911, in what he considered the criminally dull London suburb of North Finchley and that his father worked at Smithfield meat market, albeit more as a bowler-hatted and modestly well-off provisions merchant than a blood-spattered meat porter.
An out-and-out snob 'even as a nipper', young Thomas Stevens felt he had been the victim of some kind of genetic mix-up that, instead of delivering him to the glorious, glamorous, golden corner of England where he felt he belonged, had dumped him into the mundane, mediocre, lower-middle-class milieu of Finchley.
It did not seem fair; it did not seem right.
From an early age, young Tom did everything he could to ensure he would escape. By the age of ten, he'd replaced his North London accent with the crisply modulated tones of the then well known stage and cinema actor Owen Nares, a matinee idol who sounded like he'd spent most of his adult life ensconced in London's snootiest gentlemen's clubs.


That was exactly the impression that Tom, already beguiled by the comic novels of P.G. Wodehouse, wanted to give.
The transformation of Thomas Stevens into Terry Thomas had begun.
Unlike many comedians, T-T was a naturally funny man who loved to entertain an audience.
And it was as a young teenager that Tom discovered and developed this talent  -  he danced, sang, did impressions, recited comic monologues and generally played the gap-toothed 'giddy goat'.
It seemed to work. 'My family thought I was the funniest person in the world,' he would recall.
A regular in the audience at the Hippodrome in Golders Green and at his local Odeon, young Tom studied each performer and learnt to mimic whatever they did, wore or said.
He was particularly drawn to fine clothes, admiring the immaculate suiting of Douglas Fairbanks Sr, the Hollywood star known for his love of British tailoring, and longing to wear a monocle, like the Austrian actor and director Erich von Stroheim.
He could afford none of these things, but dreamed of the day when he could.
School was generally not a success, although he exhibited an early talent for memorising both lines and lyrics. Concerned for their son's future, his parents somehow found the money to send him to Ardingly College in West Sussex, a proper public school that had stern-looking, gown-wearing tutors and its fair share of bonafide toffs.
It could have been disastrous and T-T would later acknowledge it came as 'something of a shock'  -  but he responded with a bold and sustained show of 'chutzpah', entirely in keeping with the phrase that would become his motto in life: 'I shall not be cowed.'
He found artful little ways to embellish his drab uniform, caught the ear with his accent and the eye with his antics, particularly among the school's jazz fraternity who regarded him as 'the funny chap with the gift of the gab'.
'I would do anything to attract attention,' he admitted: 'The satisfaction I got when I made people laugh was indescribably potent.'
The die was well and truly cast.
Leaving Ardingly at 16 and eventually persuaded to join his father at Smithfield, Tom didn't so much embrace the world of work as toy with it.
From his very first day, he refused to blend in, turning up  -  straight-backed and 6ft tall  -  sporting an olive-green pork-pie hat, a taupe double-breasted suit with a carnation, a multi-coloured tie and yellow wash-leather gloves, twiddling a long cigarette holder with one hand and twirling a silver-topped Malacca cane with the other.
It was, he would later recall, 'the first, fine, florid rapture' of his adult dandyism.
His unique personal style would stay with him as, at the age of 18, he made his professional debut as a 'cheerer-upper' at a social evening organised by the Electric Railwaymen's Dining Club in South Kensington.
He received few laughs from his boozy audience, but was paid 30 shillings for his efforts.
Success did not arrive overnight, but his life-long love of women and sex certainly did.
Having lost his virginity at the age of 17 to his family's young and willing Cornish housekeeper, he was rarely without a girl at his side.
And when, a few years later, his work as a film extra, professional ballroom dancer and even jazz ukulele player had enabled him to rent a flat in St John's Wood, a succession of 'jolly eager girls' moved in to keep him company.
T-T even tried writing a young man's guide to modern sexual etiquette, before deciding more empirical research  -  especially on the subject of 'deep-bosomed women'  -  would be required before completion.
He changed his stage name to Terry Thomas (no hyphen as yet) in 1938, believing he needed something snappier than Thomas Stevens. It seemed to work. He not only made his radio debut on the BBC but married Ida 'Pat' Patlanski, a tall, dark-haired South African ballet dancer and choreographer with whom he had recently established a new flamenco-inspired cabaret double act.
The marriage endured but, alas, fidelity did not. Pat, Terry soon discovered, had been having casual affairs since the earliest days of their marriage, so now he too began to think relatively little of being unfaithful. Tit for tat, he called it.
It took World War II to transform Terry's career, as it did for a whole generation of comedians.
He and Pat were in the first wave of performers to sign up to the new Entertainment National Service Association (ENSA) being set up by the film producer Basil Dean, although it had to be said one of the main attractions to Terry of the first tour of not-yet- occupied northern France was a young singer called Marilyn Miller.
Marilyn, according to Terry, was blessed with 'long legs, deep bosoms, a beautiful classic face and a stunning complexion' and, with Pat conveniently dispatched back to Britain, the couple were often to be found in Terry's room, ' rehearsing new numbers'.
In 1942 he was called up and unexpectedly made quite a success of being a soldier, even being promoted to corporal in the Royal Corps of Signals.
However, when old problems with his stomach and ears resulted in his health being downgraded from A1 to B1 at the beginning of 1943 he seized the opportunity to join the newly formed touring revues known as Stars In Battledress.
He never looked back, taking his own unit (as a newly promoted sergeant) all over Britain and most parts of occupied Europe, even occasionally sneaking off to make an unbilled appearance, quite illegally, on the West End cabaret circuit where more sophisticated material could be attempted and a better quality of brandy imbibed.
Colleagues were impressed and intimidated by his work ethic when it came to conjuring comedy. 'The only time old Terry is really serious,' said one, 'is when he's putting on a show  -  he's worse than any sergeant major.'
After demobilisation  -  and initially thanks to the contacts he had made during his Stars In Battledress days  -  Terry's career took off, and he won his own show on the BBC's Home Service, the variety show To Town With Terry.
But his biggest break  -  and one that would change the face of television comedy  -  came in 1949 when a rather raffish-looking man walked up so close to the camera that his face filled the screen. 'How do you view?' he inquired with a gap-toothed grin. 'Are you frightfully well? You are? Oh, good show.'
That man, of course, was Terry-Thomas, the newly inserted hyphen apparently there to tie the two names together. 'They didn't mean much apart,' he argued. 'Together they made a trade name.'
The next 15 years were a glorious time for T-T. When the groundbreaking How Do You View?, which was the first real television comedy series, came to an end after five runs and his television career faltered, his film career took off.
His first Hollywood picture, Bachelor Flat, was not a great success, but all the hard work T-T had put in to creating his extraordinary-public persona soon paid off.
His roguish version of the archetypal Englishman was exactly what Hollywood wanted and his reward was a series of tasty parts in films such as the star-studded It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and How To Murder Your Wife, for which he was paid £100,000. The equivalent fee today would be about £3 million.
These were glory years, with good parts, huge money and lucrative advertisements all rolling in. In 1962, he even married again, just after he was finally, officially, divorced from Pat.
But he didn't marry Lorrae Desmond, the Australian singer and actress who had been his constant companion for seven years and who T-T once described as the 'sexiest person' he had ever met and the most 'dedicated woman in bed'.
Instead, he overcame a 26-year age gap to marry the girl who had consoled him when his relationship with Lorrae broke down, 21-year-old Belinda Cunningham, a lieutenant-colonel's daughter from Lincolnshire.
Her father was initially appalled, but Belinda would remain with T-T for the rest of his life, bear him two sons  -  Tiger and Cushan  -  and help him build an idyllic home on the newly fashionable island of Ibiza, where she would occasionally surprise visitors by emerging from the swimming pool stark naked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, T-T spoilt his young wife rotten.
'Whatever Belinda and I wanted, we bought. And we wanted the lot. We knew the fat cheques would last for ever.'
But they didn't, of course. In 1971, while touring Australia, a doctor giving him a routine check-up asked T-T if had noticed his left hand was trembling slightly.
He hadn't.
Back in London, his GP immediately sent him to see a neurological specialist. The news was not good. At the age of 59, he had Parkinson's Disease.
His cousin, the actor Richard Briers, was there when T-T broke the news to his family at their South Kensington flat. Briers says: 'Terry raised a glass of champagne and smiled, but then said: "I have to tell you that I have £1 million, after tax, in the bank  -  but I've got bloody Parkinson's." '
It was the beginning of a long, slow and particularly cruel decline that would leave the great raconteur silent and virtually penniless and his poor wife physically and psychologically exhausted.
He continued to work sporadically throughout the Seventies, but the disease took its toll. In 1977, concerned by gossip that he had a drink problem, T-T went public with the real explanation for his slurred speech and constant stumbles.
He even recorded a moving appeal on BBC television for funds for those engaged in Parkinson's research.
Slowly, the public Terry-Thomas  -  the endearing rogue that British audiences had loved for more than 30 years  -  slipped from view.
The Eighties were terrible years. Work was impossible, his fortune eaten up by medical fees, and he needed constant care. In 1988, T-T and Belinda crept back to Britain and set up home in a small unfurnished flat in Barnes.
Briers remembers visiting them and being shocked by what he saw. 'He was just sitting there, motionless; a crippled, crushed shadow. It was really bloody awful.'
When news got out of T-T's plight, showbiz friends rallied round to hold one of the biggest benefit nights London had ever seen, raising almost £100,000, half of which was sufficient for T-T to spend his final days in comfort at a nursing home in Surrey, the other half going to the Parkinson's Disease Society.
The end came on the morning of January 8, 1990. Aged 78, Terry-Thomas, the greatest British bounder in showbiz history, was dead.
• Adapted from BOUNDER by Graham McCann, published by Aurum Press on September 18 at £16.99. Graham McCann 2008. To order a copy at £15.30 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.


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The Full English - Aston Martin DB3S/2 // The Aston Martin DB3S in School for Scoundrels,

Quote - "An Aston Martin DB3S team car gunned by Moss, Collins, Brooks and Salvadori, subsequently driven into the Solent by a suicidal love-sick mechanic and later co-starring with Terry-Thomas in the legendary film School for Scoundrels? DB3S/5 started as a road car for David Brown with an experimental glassfibre body. After a disastrous '54 Le Mans it was given the aluminium body of 3S/2 for an active racing life as a factory team car. After success with Roy Salvadori, it went to privateer Dennis Barthel in 1957. He had the car prepared by Rob Walker's Pippbrook Garage where it was fettled by Alan Overton. Unfortunately the caddish DB3S owner took up with the young mechanic's fiance and tragedy followed. Barthel let Overton drive the Aston at the Gosport Speed Trials and although the mechanic set fastest time in his class he didn't live to collect his trophy on that April bank holiday. Overton never lifted off the throttle beyond the finishing post and ended his life by driving straight into the sea. The car was rebuilt with a new body; re-registered PAP 625, it was christened the Bellini to co-star with Terry-Thomas and Ian Carmichael in School for Scoundrels. The car, with its distinctive front end, was styled by Carrozzeria Touring and passed through the hands of several enthusiasts until the late Bill Lake had it meticulously restored to its original factory team car style and tracked down its old works registration 9046 H. The present owner, Erich Traber, is a regular Mille Miglia entrant following in the tracks of Peter Collins."

The Aston Martin Works Sale

Tim Schofield

London, United Kingdom

21 May 2016

https://www.bonhams.com/press_release/21588/

 

Newport Pagnell, Aston Martin Works Service

A rare Aston Martin Works team car – chassis number DB3S/5 – which was campaigned in period by such legendary racing drivers as Sir Stirling Moss, Peter Collins and Roy Salvadori, and latterly went on to co-star with Terry-Thomas in 1960s movie classic School for Scoundrels, will be offered at Bonhams Aston Martin Works Sale on 21 May 2016. It is estimated at £6,000,000-7,000,000.

 

This historic Aston Martin began life as the personal road car of David Brown, the multi-millionaire industrialist owner of the Aston Martin marque. Under Brown's reign the legendary post-World War 2 'DB' series of Aston Martin cars were built, including the Atom, the DB2, DB3, DB4, DB5, DB6, DB7, DB9 and the DBS, all named using Brown's initials.

 

Aston Martin also built a number of DB3S models for the Works racing team. Following a severe set-back during the 1954 Le Mans 24-hour race, when three of the cars were destroyed in a series of crashes, the Aston Martin Competitions Department commandeered David Brown's personal DB3S - chassis 5 now offered here - to replace one of the wrecked vehicles, changing its use from high-performance road car, to frontline Works Team race car.

 

The DB3S originally featured experimental glass fibre bodywork, which was the height of cutting-edge technology for the period. However, after Brown handed it over to the Works team, it was given an aluminium body-shell and upgraded to full Works specification. It never returned to David Brown's personal ownership, and instead went on to be raced by some of the most daring drivers of the time, in some of the motor sporting world's most prestigious races.

 

"Few cars that have appeared in film can also boast an association with so many great names from the heyday of the British racing sports car, but this Aston Martin DB3S does just that," said Tim Schofield, Bonhams UK Head Motoring. "Drivers who raced it include such legends as Peter Collins, Roy Salvadori, and Sir Stirling Moss, competing at world-class level in such gruelling races as the Mille Miglia, the Spa Grand Prix and the Nürburgring 1,000kms."

 

The Aston Martin DB3S later starred in the 1960s British comedy, School for Scoundrels, in which Ian Carmichael battled with caddish (but much loved) Terry-Thomas for the affections of Janette Scott. The movie is a classic tale of one-upmanship, and its plot features several notable vehicles, such as the 'Swiftmobile', which was in reality a 1928 Bentley 4½-Litre Open Tourer in disguise, an ex-Works Austin-Healey 100-Six, and - of course - the car driven by Terry-Thomas, named the 'Bellini', which was none other than this magnificent Aston Martin DB3S.

1953 Aston Martin DB3S Is a Magnificently Retro Racing Car

11 May 2016, 11:47 UTC · by Mircea Panait author picHome > News > Car Profile

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/1953-aston-martin-db3s-is-a-magnificently-retro-racing-car-107369.html

 

Following the disappointingly uncompetitive DB3 of 1951, Aston Martin developed the DB3S. Only 31 examples of the DB3S were ever manufactured: 11 race cars and 20 customer cars. The DB3S we’ll be talking about today is a race-ready example, an Aston Martin Works machine bearing chassis #DB3S/5.

 

This blast from the past is set to go under the hammer at the Aston Martin Works Sale on May 21, and Bonhams expects to sell it for anything between £6 to £7 million. That will be $8.65 to $10.1 million converted at current exchange rates, a lot of money for a gray-haired racecar with torsion bars and trailing arms.

 

But then again, DB3S/5 began life as the personal car of David Brown, the multi-millionaire industrialist who owned Aston Martin during its heyday. The first racing action seen by DB3S/5 came as a necessity after three DB3S cars were destroyed during the 1954 Le Mans race. So yes, this singleton saw some competition.

 

"Few cars that have appeared in film can also boast an association with so many great names from the heyday of the British racing sports car, but this Aston Martin DB3S does just that," declared Tim Schofield, the head of the motoring department at Bonhams. "Drivers who raced it include such legends as Peter Collins, Roy Salvadori, and Sir Stirling Moss, competing at world-class level in such grueling races as the Mille Miglia, the Spa Grand Prix and the Nurburgring 1,000 KM."

 

DB3S/5 also starred in School for Scoundrels, a comedy from 1960 in which Terry-Thomas drives the car. Despite the wear and tear gathered over the years, the car was fully restored by the British manufacturer two years ago and it is ready to rumble. The highest bidder will get some extras aside from the car itself, including a spare engine block.

British Museum is right to keep Parthenon marbles, says new trustee

 

 Tiffany Jenkins is an author, academic, broadcaster, and consultant on cultural policy. Her writing credits include the Independent, the Art Newspaper, the Guardian, the Scotsman (for which she was a weekly columnist on social and cultural issues) and the Spectator. She is an Honorary Fellow in Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh; a former visiting fellow in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and was previously the director of the Arts and Society Programme at the Institute of Ideas. She competed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Kent and divides her time between London and Edinburgh.

She has advised a number of organisations on cultural policy, including Trinity College, Dublin; English Heritage; the British Council; the Norwegian government; the University of Oslo; Norwegian Theatres and Orchestras; and the National Touring Network for Performing Arts, Norway

 The fabulous collections housed in the world's most famous museums are trophies from an imperial age. Yet the huge crowds that each year visit the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, or the Metropolitan in New York have little idea that many of the objects on display were acquired by coercion or theft.

 

Now the countries from which these treasures came would like them back. The Greek demand for the return of the Elgin Marbles is the tip of an iceberg that includes claims for the Benin Bronzes from Nigeria, sculpture from Turkey, scrolls and porcelain taken from the Chinese Summer Palace, textiles from Peru, the bust of Nefertiti, Native American sacred objects, and Aboriginal human remains.

 

In Keeping Their Marbles, Tiffany Jenkins tells the bloody story of how western museums came to acquire these objects. She investigates why repatriation claims have soared in recent decades and demonstrates how it is the guilt and insecurity of the museums themselves that have stoked the demands for return. Contrary to the arguments of campaigners, she shows that sending artefacts back will not achieve the desired social change nor repair the wounds of history.

 

Instead, this ground-breaking book makes the case for museums as centres of knowledge, demonstrating that no object has a single home, and no one culture owns culture.

British Museum is right to keep Parthenon marbles, says new trustee

 

Historian Dr Tiffany Jenkins is one of the lineup of new appointees that has raised cultural and historical hackles

 

Vanessa Thorpe

Sun 23 Mar 2025 08.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/mar/23/british-museum-is-right-to-keep-parthenon-marbles-says-new-trustee

 

The latest appointments to the British Museum’s trustees include an academic expert opposed to the ­restitution of stolen antiquities.

 

Dr Tiffany Jenkins, author of Keeping Their Marbles, will join new trustees including TV broadcaster and writer Claudia Winkleman, Lord Finkelstein, a Conservative peer who was an adviser to prime minister John Major, the historian and podcaster Tom Holland and the former BBC radio news anchor Martha Kearney for a four-year term. The chair of trustees is George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer.

 

The Parthenon, or Elgin, marbles are the ancient Greek sculptures that once decorated the temple on the Acropolis in Athens. They were removed between 1801 and 1815 by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, who claimed he had permission to take them, although no supporting document has been found. The sculptures were acquired by the British Museum in 1816, but their rightful ownership has been ­disputed since the 1980s.

 

In her book Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums… and Why They Should Stay There, Jenkins examined the influences behind the high-profile battle to return museum artefacts in an attempt to repair historical wrongs. Her views are at odds with those of another well-known historian and broadcaster, Dr Alice Roberts, who recently met the Greek culture minister, Lina Mendoni, while filming her series on Ancient Greece for Channel 4.

 

Earlier this month Roberts told Radio Times: “They belong back in Athens. It’s not equivalent, but I imagine we might be upset in England if another country had significant bits of Stonehenge and wouldn’t give them back. But actually the argument goes deeper than that. There’s a pressing need to recognise some of the questionable practices of the past, which often went hand in hand with the history of colonialism.”

 

Last month, Greece elected a new president, Constantine Tassoulas, who is a prominent advocate for the return of the marbles. A former culture minister, Tassoulas played a key role in revitalising efforts to reclaim the 2,500-year-old sculptures.

 

Until recently, the British response has been based on the idea that the removal was legal, and that the British Museum is the safest custodian. But the argument shifted in recent years as Greece moved away from simply claiming ownership. The question is often now framed as one of “reunification”, involving sharing the legacy.

 

This attitude was emphasised by the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who suggested that art can be kept in a different country without losing its significance. But in 2023, Rishi Sunak, who was prime minister at the time, cancelled a meeting with Mitsotakis at the last minute in a move interpreted as a way to avoid the issue.

 

Jenkins, an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, was congratulated on her appointment by Claire Fox, her colleague at the Academy of Ideas. This thinktank, founded by Fox 25 years ago on the closure of Living Marxism, is non-party political but promotes what it describes as “a robust stance on contentious issues”.

 

Also welcoming the appointment was author and presenter Timandra Harkness, who told the Observer that Jenkins was solely concerned with the serious business of protecting history and would “not be joining the board to fight any external battles”.

 

Additionally, there was criticism that the new trustees are all white. “If no one black or brown from outside London applied to become a trustee, they should have gone out to look for someone. They are out there,” said one leading cultural figure who wanted to remain anonymous but who is dismayed by the lineup.

 

The museum’s board of 20 trustees does contain a mix of cultural backgrounds, including the Indian-American Amazon executive Priyanka Wadhawan and economist prof Abhijit Banerjee as well as the economist Weijian Shan from China and the Colombian-American philanthropist Alejandro Santo Domingo.

 

Last July, culture secretary Lisa Nandy announced a drive to attract the widest pool of talent to the public appointments system.

 

Announcing the appointments, culture minister Chris Bryant said: “Public appointees help to lead some of the UK’s best-known institutions, and these immensely talented individuals with a wide range of personal and professional experience will make great contributions to how they are run and help to promote British soft power abroad.”

Brideshead Revisited: A tribute to Anthony Blanche

              

Anthony Blanche

Character Analysis

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/brideshead-revisited/characters/anthony-blanche

 

Anthony Blanche is a friend of Sebastian’s at Oxford University, and an acquaintance of Charles Ryder. Anthony is an outsider in British society for several reasons: he is foreign and has travelled all over the world, he is from a Catholic family, and he is homosexual. Anthony is picked on by other boys throughout his school years in England, and the bullying continues at university. He responds to this by embracing his unconventionality and using it shock people. He loves to break social conventions and to make people uncomfortable. However, although Anthony’s eccentric behavior is a defense mechanism and a way to protect himself, it does not make him likable or accepted the way that Sebastian’s similar behavior does. Anthony is slightly bitter about this and realizes that he is picked on because he is different, while Sebastian gets away things because people are taken in by his “English charm.” Anthony, as a foreigner, cannot rely on this and is jealous of Sebastian. He tries to tempt Charles away from Sebastian and seems irritated that Charles prefers Sebastian to him. Anthony is presented as a “devilish” figure who is the exact opposite of Sebastian’s angelic, youthful innocence. Anthony, in contrast, is worldly, experienced, and can be cruel. He thus represents the demonic side in the battle for Charles’s affections, and tries to steer Charles towards a life of lust, debauchery, and modern art, while Sebastian represents true love, and the wisdom and religious grace which comes from this. Anthony is an “aesthete,” someone who loves beauty and art, and wants Charles to unleash his inner artistic passion. He feels that Charles, who he thinks has potential to be a great artist, has been metaphorically “killed” by Sebastian because he has lost his interest in cultural exploration and, instead, wants to remain as he is and not allow change into his life. As Charles grows older, he realizes that Anthony is right in this sense, and that he must accept change to grow and develop as an artist.

 

Anthony Blanche

Character Analysis

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/brideshead-revisited/anthony-blanche.html

 

Anthony Blanche is one of the most colorful characters you’ll meet in Shmoop Literature. "A nomad of no nationality," "the aesthete par excellence," and a "fine piece of cookery," Anthony practically leaps off the pages of Brideshead Revisited with "colorful robes" and exaggerated, affected stutter. We can’t really do much better than Charles’s description of him "waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page boy," or disguising himself as a girl on account of a bet, dining with Proust, practicing black art in Cefalu, getting "cured of drug-taking in California and of an Oedipus complex in Vienna." Most telling is this line: "His vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock."

 

Indeed. In addition to being colorful and hilarious, Anthony is also flamboyantly and stereotypically gay. He threatens to "stick [Sebastian] full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion" and says to Mulcaster, "Who knows better than you by taste for queer fish?" He will later tell Sebastian, "If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things [than alcohol]" while bringing him to who is most likely a male prostitute (though we could be way off here – who knows). He tells a group of mocking students that he would "like nothing better than the manhandled by you meaty boys." Sebastian later refers to him as "Charlus," a gay character from one of Proust’s novels. Aside from innuendo, we have clear statements of his sexuality. "I may be inverted but I am not insatiable," he tells a group of young boys at his door. ("Inverted" was the not-so-politically correct term at the time for being gay.) Charles also refers to Sebastian as "my pansy friend" later in the novel.

 

Aside from the comedy, Anthony, much like Cara and Cordelia, is around in Brideshead Revisited to give Charles – and therefore the reader – information second hand. His relationship with Charles revolves around three key encounters, all of which consist of Anthony talking. A lot. First is the famous dinner out at Oxford, when Anthony puts in his two cents (make that two dollars) about the Flyte family. From his scathing critique of Julia as "a passionless, acquisitive, intriguing, ruthless killer" to his unexpected description of Sebastian as "insipid," Anthony has opinions on everything and everyone. His lengthy discourse with Charles serves as our introduction to the Flytes, and raises the stakes on the discoveries to follow. When Sebastian later dismisses these comments as gossip and lies, Charles writes them off. But Waugh makes sure we’re still left wondering: Sebastian quickly changes the subject to that of his teddy-bear, just as Anthony suggested he would. Sounds like Blanche knows what he’s talking about…

 

And indeed, many of Anthony’s comments about the Flytes do turn out to be true. Julia is admittedly a semi-heathen like her brother, the history regarding Lord and Lady Marchmain’s marriage is later confirmed, and Charles concludes that Lady Marchmain is as manipulative as everyone says. But what about Sebastian? Does Anthony’s description hold true? Let’s take a closer look at what he claims about our favorite teddy-bear-toting student:

 

"Tell me candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' […] When dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then – "phut! – vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing."

 

OK…so Anthony has a point. Sebastian isn’t exactly profound, and he tends spend most of his time talking about the temper of his stuffed bear. But what’s wrong with simply being light-hearted? Plenty, according to Anthony. He believes that Sebastian poses a particular threat to Charles, and more specifically to Charles’s artistic abilities.

 

In Charles’s "Character Analysis" we talk a lot about Charles’s aesthetic education and the progress he makes, artistically, throughout the course of the novel. Anthony and his comments on "English charm" are a big part of this education. He touches on the subject briefly during this first big speech at Oxford, but it’s not until his final scene in the novel – out with Charles after the big exhibition – that the point really hits home for Charles (and for the reader, of course). Take a look:

 

"I was right years ago – more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows – when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

 

While everyone else is going gaga over Charles’s new, feral paintings, Anthony is unconvinced that Charles has managed to escape British charm and become a true artist. He says of the artwork: "It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers." Charm has strangled (or even "thwarted," an important word in Brideshead Revisited) Charles’s artistic potential.

 

And of course, Anthony blames Sebastian for siccing this charm on Charles. Over and over again the word is used to describe Sebastian and his "Bubbles"-like manner of speaking. In just his first conversation with Charles, Anthony says that "Sebastian has charm […], such charm," suggests that in a church confessional he was "just being charming through the grille," reiterates that "he has such charm" and that "[he’s] so charming, so amusing," claims that "those who are charming [like Sebastian] don’t need brains," calls him "a little bundle of charm," concludes that in fact all the Flytes are "charming, of course," and finishes by saying "there was really very little left for poor Sebastian to do except be sweet and charming." He says the only reason Sebastian still visits is father is "because he’s so charming," and advises that Charles not blame Sebastian for being "insipid," "simple," and… "charming."

 

OK. We think we’ve made our point. But now you can understand that when Anthony says "It is not an experience I would recommend for An Artist at the tenderest stage of his growth, to be strangled with charm" that what he’s really warning Charles against isn’t just good manners; he’s warning him against Sebastian. And he might be right to do so. Consider the fact that Charles is a Captain in the army telling his story and seems to have abandoned art altogether. In fact, Charles straight out agrees with Anthony’s interpretation of his paintings as "British charm playing tigers." "You’re quite right," he says to Anthony, and that’s the last we hear from him in the subject of art. When Lord Marchmain asks him at the end of the novel whether he will become an Artist, his response is simple, "No. As a matter of fact I am negotiating now for a commission in the Special Reserve." And that’s that.