Fancy a pint? (Evil Spirits: The Life of Oliver Reed - Cliff Goodwin)

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Evil Spirits: The Life of Oliver Reed - Cliff Goodwin
Date:	10/02/02 (749 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fascinating

Disadvantages: sooner or later, some moron will put a comment on telling me much fun Reed sounds like he had

For some men, the life of Oliver Reed was probably the complete male life. He was famous, he shagged an inordinate number of women, he drank like a fish, and he died in a pub. What more could you want? Reading Cliff Godwin's 'Evil Spirits', you don't actually get any contradiction of that; Reed did live a life of debauchery, drinking games, affairs and drinking. But nevertheless, every time I put the book down, I did so with the same thought in my head: thank God I was not born Oliver Reed.

There is a significant flaw with this book which from a film-lover's perpective, it never quite recovers. Though he is writing about a film actor (unlike most UK stars, Reed had virtually no stage experience), Godwin has no real critical skills. Whenever he is talking about the movies, he is very comfortable with anecdotes about how the films were made, and what went on during the filming. But he's rubbish at the films themselves. He never attempts to analyse what Reed's movies were like, and generally relies on a summary of what contemporary critics thought. Because Reed managed to make so few good films - aside from 'Gladiator', his only real successes lay his first movies with Michael Winner (the only decent films Winner ever made were in the sixties, featuring Reed), and those he made for Ken Russell (most notably 'Women in Love' and 'The Devils'). But Godwin isn't really able to analyse what kind of an impact Reed had, or why his post-60s choices were so dismal.

But the reader has probably bought the book to learn more about the offscreen antics, knowing the actor more for his appearances on chat-shows than his acting talents. This is a tragedy, as Reed was one of those actors who had phenomenal talents which he spent his entire life entirely failing to capitalise on, but he condemned himself to this fate, and you can't blame Godwin for concentrating on those things which Reed allowed to dominate
his life.

So you learn about Reed's staggering capacity for alcohol, his complete unability to behave in any normal situation, and his amazing knack for screwing his own life up. Denied any real insight into why Reed was such a child, such a sophisticated charmer without booze in his system, and such an animal once it was in him, you're left with about 400 pages of slowing down past a traffic accident.

Yes - Reed's patriotism led him to refuse a move to America in the early-seventies, a move made by his contemporaries Sean Connery and Michael Caine (actors who remain commercially successful, widely admired, and alive), a decision which saw key roles in major movies going to an inferior British actor (Robert Shaw, in both 'The Sting' and 'Jaws'). Yes - the most famous incidents of Reed's drunkenness on television (for example, his singing and dancing on 'Aspel', still a favourite for Denis Norden-style shows) were hoaxes, hoaxes which irretrievably damaged his career. Yes - even when he had a good chance of a comeback (Nic Roeg's 'Castaway', 'Gladiator') he threw the chance away, by getting shitfaced and trashing a restaurant, but exposing himself, by dying.

Having read 'Evil Spirits', I know all the wrong things - he had a permanent inability to deal with women, he had a habit of throwing cakes on himself when jokes went wrong, he had eagle's claws tattooed on his penis. I'll pause, and say that again, he had eagle's claws tattooed on his penis. And yet, Godwin doesn't explain why. Perhaps Reed was an enigma, perhaps he was just an incomprehensible idiot, and yet watch some of his movies ('Women in Love', 'I'll Never forget Whatsisname', 'The Jokers') and you can see that he had enormous talent, great charisma, and one of the richest speaking voices any British actor has had in the past forty years.

So the question is -
do I recommend it? Well, sort of. I would insist you do a little digging and see some of Reed's worthwhile work, but 'Evil Spirits', as a simple catalogue of a man going completely off the rails, is a fascinating, deeply depressing read.

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