reilly ace of spies

The other night we watched Possession. Not a film for the faint-hearted. Andrzej Zulawski takes the kitchen sink and throws it at a marital breakdown. There’s everything from a sexualised monster (created by the man who would later go on to create ET) to a three minute subway sequence of Isabelle Adjani having one of the most severe breakdowns ever seen on film. (She won best actress at Cannes for it.) Adjani co-stars with a young Sam Neill. The acting is frankly bizarre. The director clearly told his stars to go for it and that they did. There are not just moments but whole sequences that are so over-the-top they give the impression of two fish thrashing around out of water, gasping for breath. At the same time, there’s a degree of commitment to the work, of zero compromise, which is impressive. If you want no-holds-barred acting, for better or for worse, Possession is a good place to go. A coherent script might have helped, but clearly there was something out of control about Zulawski’s movie, which is filmed in a divided Berlin and includes shots of East German border guards looking on from the other side of the omnipresent Wall.

The film was released in 1981. Quite how Sam Neill, then in his early 30s, ended up acting in it is something of a mystery. IMDB reveals he was also in Omen 3 around this time, but otherwise his previous work seems to have been predominantly in Australia. Two years later he would go on to become the protagonist in the British TV series, Reilly Ace of Spies, which cemented his reputation.

Watching Neill lock horns with Adjani; threaten to cut his arm off; have a demented fit in a hotel room, turned out to be a Proustian moment. It took me back over twenty years to an Australian I knew in London, called Bruce. I cannot remember his surname. We worked together for a while in the Natural Shoe Store. The Natural Shoe Store purported to be a hippy-vibe place, in keeping with an emerging New London glamour. The first place to sell Birkenstocks, it was frequented by stars like Pavarotti, Annie Lennox, Sade etc. The hippie exterior, like the emerging New London vibe, was deceptive. The Shoe Store was then, and still is, an astutely marketed company, run by a craven American capitalist. Located in Covent Garden, it had a high staff turnover, many of them over-educated foreigners looking to earn a crust during their stay in London.

Bruce was one of these. A tall man, clean-cut, with what might be described as old-school Australian values. Australian men can be split into two camps. The roisterers and the old-school. The latter is a long way from standard UK perceptions of drunken Antipodeans. There’s something upstanding and almost Victorian about old-school Aussies. More likely to savour a good wine than down a tinny. Bruce wore brogues and spoke softly. He was not shy, but always measured his words carefully. We got on fine.

At the end of my stint at the Shoe Store, I decided to go on a small tour of Europe, whilst I could still buy an inter-rail pass, the magic ticket which allowed you to travel anywhere on European rail for a month if you were under 26. Before the days of discount air travel or the Channel Tunnel, cities like Madrid retained an alien, exotic feel. You arrived at dawn after an endless train journey. The cafés were full of chain-smokers who looked like they might once have played a prominent role in a Fascist regime. I hung out with an American artist who claimed to have sold his work to Dennis Hopper. He tried desperately to chat up girls who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, showing them postcards of his paintings, which looked like rip-offs of Douanier Rousseau.

After Madrid, the artist headed off to visit the caves at Altamira. I went on to Granada and the Alhambra. Then Gerona, the Pyrenees, Zurich, Naples. And finally Venice, where Bruce and I had arranged to meet. In the days before email or mobiles, we had nothing more concrete than a date, a time, and a place, the place being the Rialto bridge. He was several hours late, but I never doubted the old-school Australian would show up.

We spent a couple of days together. Neither of us were excited about seeing the tourist spots. Instead we took boats to far-flung islands and explored the margins. One of these islands was nothing more than rickety housing blocks with raw sewage in the ‘street’ and angry dogs. Bruce took black and white photographs. Later he gave me a couple of large prints which accompanied me for several years, on walls in Bournemouth, Winchester and London, before fading away. As did Bruce, who I presume ended up back in Australia.

I don’t know if it was on this trip or back in the UK that Bruce opened up. About his former girlfriend, with whom he had lived and hoped to marry. I may have imagined this, but I understood that he’d chosen to go traveling in Europe as a result of their break-up. Which occurred, he explained, when she met the actor, Sam Neill. Then in his post- Reilly phase, when he must have been something of a superstar in Australia. Neill had a fling with Bruce’s partner and she had left Bruce for him. It was hard to imagine the upright Bruce and the Hollywood star with the same woman. As Bruce himself put it. It was a choice of: “Me… or ‘Reilly Ace of Spies’”. Meaning, he seemed to suggest, ruefully, there wasn’t really any choice at all.