Paul C. Dobbs

Tried watching The Owl Service but thought it was a bit of a drag. It just rambled on shapelessly and I gave up after two and a half episodes. Now watching Soldier and Me, a kids' Cold War thriller that I first watched in 1974. It's great. Here's Soldier hiding in a dustbin from Czech assassins

Soldier and Me is full of thumping action sequences. Epiode 4 has a terrific chase through an outdoor market, crane shots and all, the sort of thing you'd expect from a feature film, not a kids' TV series. And this is the iconic freeze frame I always remembered, the lads jumping off a moving train

"Well, there was this movie I seen one time About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck" The Gunfighter (1950). I've been meaning to watch this ever since I heard Bob Dylan singing about it in 1986. It's a talky but absorbing miniature, a chamber piece set mostly in a bar room

The Gunfighter is a good companion piece to The Hard Way which I watched last night, the same story of an ageing gunman who has had enough but can't escape his reputation. As Bob Dylan tells it, "He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself"

"Well, there was this movie I seen one time About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck" The Gunfighter (1950). I've been meaning to watch this ever since I heard Bob Dylan singing about it in 1986. It's a talky but absorbing miniature, a chamber piece set mostly in a bar room

The Hard Way (1979). This is a bit special, with a one-off turn from Patrick McGoohan. Not many actors would have the gravity or the balls to try it. He just looks tired, finished, and reluctantly deadly, and gets by on a hundred or so barely perceptible variations on that. Which is more than enough

Lee Van Cleef plays McGoohan's reptilian paymaster, McNeal, and they play great off each other. It's all very dismal but gripping, in a 70s TV sort of way, and though the climax is slightly silly, with a house-of-games showdown, they both play it so sombre that it hardly undermines the mood

The Hard Way (1979). This is a bit special, with a one-off turn from Patrick McGoohan. Not many actors would have the gravity or the balls to try it. He just looks tired, finished, and reluctantly deadly, and gets by on a hundred or so barely perceptible variations on that. Which is more than enough

The film makes a point of its Irishness. The West of Ireland is dangled as a sort of heavenly afterlife for McGoohan, who wants to retire, and its countryside has rarely looked so lovely. But by his wife's account he can love only guns, as his father did, and all this is something to do with history

The Hard Way (1979). This is a bit special, with a one-off turn from Patrick McGoohan. Not many actors would have the gravity or the balls to try it. He just looks tired, finished, and reluctantly deadly, and gets by on a hundred or so barely perceptible variations on that. Which is more than enough

Captain Boycott (1947). A grim, witty, and mostly true story of non-violent resistance to colonial exploitation. Stewart Granger is so good you can forgive his accent wandering between County Mayo and Kensington. He doesn't dominate, and the cast is mostly Irish, proper, no paddywhackery

From a dramatic point of view, Boycott himself seems poorly rendered, an unconvincing mixture of wickedness and stupidity. But the real Boycott was clearly something like that. And he was not a landlord (the landlords were absentees), but an agent, an employee, doing what the system demanded

Captain Boycott (1947). A grim, witty, and mostly true story of non-violent resistance to colonial exploitation. Stewart Granger is so good you can forgive his accent wandering between County Mayo and Kensington. He doesn't dominate, and the cast is mostly Irish, proper, no paddywhackery

You have to feel sorry for Kathleen Ryan, who gets second billing but is completely squeezed out of the story. There's a perfunctory nod to her as Granger's love interest, but the film is only interested in the conflict and politics, which is enough to be fair

The Internecine Project (1974). Ingenious plotter James Coburn pulling everyone's strings like a big dastardly mastermind. The cinematography is a nice warm bath but the story is cold and nasty. Loved both. Excellent support too from a gruff gay Harry Andrews and a whimpering Ian Bannen

And mustn't forget the tasty Roy Budd score, with slinky double bass lines and tabla drum recalling his work on Get Carter

The Internecine Project (1974). Ingenious plotter James Coburn pulling everyone's strings like a big dastardly mastermind. The cinematography is a nice warm bath but the story is cold and nasty. Loved both. Excellent support too from a gruff gay Harry Andrews and a whimpering Ian Bannen

I was excited to see Lee Grant was in it, but they've got her in a frightful wig and her character is given little to do except moon over James Coburn like a teenager. (I mean he does look great, still wearing his Pat Garrett moustache). There's a half-hearted attempt to make her...

Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Michael Caine is put right in the shade by all the batshit stuff going on around him, and by Karl Malden, Oscar Homolka, and Ed Begley who give themselves up entirely to the nuttiness in a way that Caine, as the necessary straight man, can't really

If you want to know just how nutty it is, Begley is a megalomaniac American billionaire Nazi with an AI. How outlandish is that. Even the nuttiest films should have some kind of internal logic though, and this has none. Never mind, it's fast, full of incident, a right old hoot with brain disengaged

I am learning the drum part to Union City Blue and it's a whopper. Like a lot of Clem Burke drum parts it is not just a beat, but a composition in its own right, and a compendium of cool licks that you can borrow and use elsewhere. And it all sounds better the harder you hit it, a-la-Clem

He was once at the centre of a research project into how drumming affects physical fitness, brain function, and neurology. He was the perfect subject because he was always drumming, never took a break, and played harder than almost anybody. He was in his 50s when he did that project