UR TV CAST

Eszterhas’s own writing has become as formulaic as his imitators’, even though it was he who invented the formula (in Jagged Edge, which now seems classic rather than cliched).Jade and Showgirls illustrate both Eszterhas’s immense talent and its falling-off. His ability to set up themes in a few opening scenes, like a dealer rifling cards from the deck, is undiminished. But he seems to have lost the will or the patience to develop them. Jade, which continues Eszterhas’s climb up the social scale in subject matter as he grows more successful, never gets off first base as a political commentary.

Showgirls, a return to the topic of working-class exploitation, raises ideas about the relationship of dancing to sex, and of gambling to American life, but degenerates into an unseemly mess. Eszterhas’s scripts have always lacked humour, relying on the crude cracks of his sex-obsessed male characters. In both the new films, dialogue plumbs new depths of depravity.Eszterhas is a victim of his own success and self-promotion. Had Jade or Showgirls slipped on to the screen without the ballyhoo, they might have been modest, even major successes. As it is, they have become behemoths of hype, waiting for critics and audiences to shoot them down Eszterhas’s early hits were founded on deep research.

All the adulation and money may have removed the incentive for such hard work (a project about a US president caught in a scandal involving a cow sounds less than promising). But Eszterhas should return to those virtues that made him such a compelling commentator on vice.! ‘Jade’ is out now (cinema details, page 92); ‘Showgirls’ opens 12 Jan.. FRANK, the secretary of the Mervyn Peake Society, had met the German composer of Gormenghast once before “Strange chap,” he thought “A bit cool, man, if you know what I mean. Not, um, very easy to talk to.” On his part, Irmin Schmidt had had the odd apprehension, too. “We find something nice and strange, I think,” he said, the day before meeting the Peake enthusiasts to present his new opera to them.

“These can be weird and fanatic people, no?”

Judging by what they read, you might think so. Mervyn Peake’s trilogy – Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone – is, no other word for it, weird. It’s Tolkien gone to seed, set in a kingdom of ancient ritual that’s populated by charac- ters called Rottcodd, Slagg, Fuchsia and Prunesquallor. Gormenghast is the home of the Lords of Groan, a vast ramifying dungeon where the main action of the books takes place. Apparently Benjamin Britten came near to making an opera of the trilogy in the Fifties, but stepped back from the brink Peake’s son Sebastian even has his father’s libretto But they were ill matched.