Revolutionary spirits: three London wartime hostelries

1. The French House

Frequented by the French Resistance in London, Free French leader Charles de Gaulle is said to have come up with his call to arms after lunch upstairs. Ironic, perhaps, that the pub was set up by a German, who sold up at the outbreak of World War I to a Belgian family who named it the York Minster before it settled on its current title.

49 Dean St, W1D 5BG

2. De Hems

A meeting place for the Dutch Resistance in World War II, the pub owes its name to a Dutch seaman who bought the premises in the 1890s and set it up as an oyster bar. It retains a Dutch theme, serving Low Country food and beers.

11 Macclesfield St, W1D 5BW

3. Ognisko Polish Club and Restaurant

Donated by Prince George of Kent to the Polish Resistance in the Second World War, a recent review in the Telegraph is singularly uncomplimentary.

55 Exhibition Rd, SW7 2PN

Tintin in Arabia Part Two

Land of Black Gold was begun in wartime although frequently interrupted until a colour version emerged in 1950, set in Palestine. At the instigation of UK publishers Tintin's arrival in Haifa - and prompt arrest by British police controlling the then mandate - was changed in a third edition (1971) to the fictional location of Khemed, ruled by Emir Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, excising a rich historical seam. (Michael Farr's book Tintin: The Complete Companion, 2001, illustrates the changes, as well as showing many of Hergé's pictorial sources for the stories.)

The early petrol explosions that instigate the adventure still sparkle, as do the book's night-time desert scenes and the comic mirages experienced by bungling detective duo Thompson and Thomson (in part reprised from Cigars of the Pharoah, where they made their first appearance); Oliveira de Figueira and Sheikh Patrash Pasha both reappear, alongside villain Dr Müller (from The Black Island, 1938, 1943, updated 1966). Working alongside Sheikh Bab El Ehr, whose acts of sabotage are destroying the country's reputation as an oil provider, he aims to acquire Khemed's petroleum industry for western corporations.

This is the most atmospheric of the Arabian books - and one of the most atmospheric of the entire series - full of telling behaviour. Fans of Tom McCarthy's novel C won't be surprised to learn the author picks up on the misreadings in the book in his study Tintin and the Secret of Literature. McCarthy is particularly drawn to Tintin as an avatar for the century of communication: 'Forget journalism: what Tintin actually does is send and receive radio messages. This is his job on the boat in Land of Black Gold... Some of Hergé's most striking images are not of characters or actions but of radio masts, wires casting signals and antennae picking them up. In both Cigars of the Pharoah and The Red Sea Sharks Tintin floats on the ocean while transmissions billow and swirl around him.'

In The Red Sea Sharks (1958), the last of Tintin's adventures to be set in the Middle East, Bab El Ehr (a name embodying miscommunication: babbler) seizes power from Emir Ben Kalish Ezab, while the emir's spoilt son Abdullah, introduced in Land of Black Gold, takes centre stage. The book is again terrifically relevant, as Captain Allan is now engaged in human trafficking (giving rise to an an image riffed upon in bleak but very funny new film Louise Michel). Nor can Hergé resist a visit to Petra, Jordan's rose city, another setting for Indiana Jones, of course.

As Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier write of Emir Ben Kalish Ezab, 'it is clear the man is a self-centred autocrat, no better than Bab El Ehr... Is he supposed to be on our side merely because he sells oil to us? Is restoring him to power the happy ending the book suggests...? The whole dynamic of the western world's dealings with the Arab world is appropriately captured, if not resolved, in The Red Sea Sharks.' Perhaps even, as they note, in a way its author had not intended.

Tintin in Arabia Part One

Much ink has been expended on racism and anti-semitism in Hergé's Tintin books. As the Belgian author's draughtsmanship improved so did his knowledge of the world; in these tumultuous times, and ahead of Steven Spielberg's much-vaunted screen version, I wanted to pick out the Arab themes in his oeuvre. The best artists manage to anticipate events, and this could be said of Hergé's development from two-dimensional characterisation.

The intrepid boy reporter first travels to North Africa in the fourth Tintin adventure: Cigars of the Pharoah (black-and-white edition 1934, colour 1955). After the message locations of the problematic earlier books (in the Soviet Union, Congo and USA), Egypt offers an ideal setting: full of iconic landmarks and mythology loved by children. Surprising, then, that our hero should be framed for smuggling heroin, of all things.

Hergé is extending his palette here, notably in a drug-fuelled dream sequence, while pursuing the nonsensical leaps and bounds of the adventure format. In Tintin: Hergé & His Creation, Harry Thompson says the adventure was originally called Tintin in the East, with the first half dubbed The Cairo Affair, before the action moves to India. It introduces, too, a series of characters who recur in the Middle East stories: Sheikh Patrash Pasha (a Tintin fan, it turns out), entrepreneur Oliveira da Figueira - though Portuguese, he is reminiscent of the enterprising fixers you so often encounter in the Levant - and media mogul Rastapopoulos, who becomes one of Tintin's stock enemies.

The latter's sidekick, Captain Allan, and the mysterious sign of Kih-Oskh recur in a parallel work, The Crab with Golden Claws (1941, 1944), one of the books Hergé created under German occupation. Famously, it includes our first encounter with bibulous Captain Haddock, the series' most beloved character, who helps Tintin escape from the attentions of Allan Thompson aboard their drug-smuggling ship, the Karaboudjan. Tintin and Haddock crash land an airplane in the Sahara, where the captain suffers hallucinations from his suddenly enforced temperance, before saving them both from attacking Berbers with the usual choice phrases: 'Rats! Ectoplasms! Freshwater swabs! Cannibals! Bashi-bazouks! Caterpilllars!'

The duo are rescued by the French Foreign Legion - a staple of any boys' own adventure - before they make their way to Morocco. Hergé had to add four beautiful full-page illustrations when the 62-page Casterman edition came up short, including a chase in a local market that could almost have served as the template for a scene in Tintin fan Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In one of the punning names that would get Hergé into trouble on another occasion, the episode's baddie is Omar Ben Salaad (loosely 'lobster salad' when said in French).

To be continued... Tune in tomorrow for Part Two!

Underground cinema 2: the Paris Métro on film

Fred Cavayé's tremendous Point Blank is due to be released in the UK 20 May and I can't recommend it highly enough. The French thriller (which I suspect will be marketed so as to mask its nationality and maximise its audience) features a great chase scene in the Métro, so I thought I'd follow up my post on films in London's Underground with a look at movies set on the Parisian tube network.

Appropriately enough for the city of love, romance features highly - from The First Night (1958) by Georges Franju through to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie (2001). In Bande à part (1964), Jean-Luc Godard's trio of Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey invent stories for a sad-looking man on the Métro, while fellow nouvelle vaguer Francois Truffaut caught Le dernier métro (1980) with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve in wartime.

Louis Malle acknowledged social unrest in his adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro (1960), when ingenue Catherine Demongeot arrives to find the underground barred by one of the system's endemic strikes. Bernardo Bertolucci also stayed above ground in Last Tango in Paris (1972) for those memorable shots of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, where the Métro crosses above the Seine between the Eiffel Tower and the posh sixteenth arrondissement. Those views are replicated in Gilles Mimouni's stylish 1996 thriller L'appartement, featuring Vincent Cassel, Romane Bohringer and Monica Bellucci.

In another thriller, Jean-Pierre Melville mounted a chase in the underground, intercut with indicator bulbs lighting up on a tube map, in Le samourai (1967), starring Alain Delon. Peak time for Métro movies came in the 1980s with the cinéma du look when first Jean-Jacques Beineix burst onto the scene with Diva (1980), which features a chase through the Métro, on and off trains and up and down escalators - on a postman's scooter!

Luc Besson uncovered a world of bag snatchers, bodybuilders and pop wannabes down there in romantic comedy-thriller-musical Subway (1985), starring Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani (pictured). Paris is always amenable to directors using its public spaces and so it was for Leos Carax' beautiful and audacious homeless romance, Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) - the most expensive French film ever.

The city's authorities were happy to close the bridge at the movie's heart for some filming but delays meant that shooting had to continue on a set recreated, with requisite Métro station, in the south of France. In a particularly brutal scene, Carax regular Denis Lavant runs through those iconic white-tiled corridors tearing down posters emblazoned with the image of his missing girlfriend, Juliette Binoche, before setting fire to the bill-sticker himself. It's a wonder Binoche doesn't stay clear of the Métro: she gets her carnet out again for Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000), which uses a confrontation with a young man on a train to examine similar racial themes to those in Hidden (Caché) five years later.

Underground cinema: London's tube on film

London’s tube is the oldest underground system in the world, so it’s not surprising that filmmakers have dwelt on the horrors that lurk beneath the city’s crust, including alien spaceships (Quatermass and the Pit, 1967) and sleeping dragons (Reign of Fire, 2002). In classic British horror film Death Line (1972), Donald Pleasence’s investigation into deaths at Russell Square leads him to inbred, plague-ridden cannibals trapped underground following a cave-in back in 1892.

Tottenham Court Road station is the scene of a memorable chase in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) while Franka Potente discovers the dangers of dropping off on the last train home in Creep (2004). Appropriately, director Ben Hopkins views commuters almost like zombies in The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (2000).

Londoners’ propensity for (urban-)myth making began as early as 1935, when rumours started to circulate that the disused British Museum station was haunted by the ghost of one of the institution's (Egyptian) mummies; a national newspaper even offered a reward to anyone willing to spend the night in the closed station. There were no takers.

The story appears to have sprung from that year’s hit Bulldog Jack, which features a supposed tunnel from the old station - renamed Bloomsbury in the film - to the historic museum. The film, starring Ralph Richardson and Fay Wray, features a climactic chase scene aboard a runaway tube train.

Zone extension: Manhunt, Passport to Pimlico, Sliding Doors, Tube Tales.

More fictional stations: Crouch End (Shaun of the Dead), High Holburn (Bulldog Drummond), Hobbs End (Quatermass and the Pit) and Vauxhall Cross (Die Another Day).

Tube blunder: Going to Heathrow on a train marked Cockfosters - the other end of the Piccadilly Line (The Rachel Papers).

Armless fun or, the cricketing kings of limb

A post of five unknown London pleasures on the great Great Wen blog recently piqued my interest. In it Peter Watts notes, 'in 1796, Montpelier Gardens in Walworth hosted a cricket match between 11 one-armed Greenwich pensioners and 11 one-legged Greenwich pensioners. Interest was so great that a fence was broken and spectators fell through a stable roof.' The scorecard is here.

Pete kindly sent me links to a couple more such matches: one between wounded army veterans at the Oval in 1862 - 'One Arm v One Leg', as the poster advertises - and another from 1858.

Then there is this on a South African site about an 1861 match between 11 one-armed and 11 one-legged men played at 11am in Peckham Rye. 'The players... played more like madmen than sober rational cricketers,' says the correspondent, who marvels at their lack of protective wear. 'What is a blow on the knuckles to a man who has lost an arm or a leg, who has felt the surgeon's saw and the keen double-edged knife?...

'Well, I suppose the fact is, that men don't think much of misfortunes when they are once irretrievable, and that these men felt a pleasure in doing an eccentric thing, in showing how bravely and easily they could overcome an infirmity that to some men appears terrible. After all, one thinks, after seeing such a game, one-legged and one-armed men are not so miserable as people imagine.'

It's a wonderful report, with beer and the heat adding to the 'Holbeinish fun'. And the outcome? Ultimately, 'the one-legs could not get at the ball quickly enough, their fielding was not first rate, the one arms made a gigantic effort... and won.'

POSTSCRIPT You won't be surprised to learn that a much darker literary take on this physical juxtaposition comes in a Georges Simenon novel: The Door (1962). In this remorseless portrait of jealousy, Bernard, whose hands were blown off by a mine, lives happily with his beautiful wife, Nelly, until he becomes convinced she is having an affair with their new downstairs neighbour - who is confined to a wheelchair. To say the outcome is bleak hardly covers it.

London by bike

If ever you're looking for a whirlwind tour of central London's best-known public spaces, may I recommend this tour from Disney's 15-year-old, live action version of 101 Dalmations. The two-minute sequence features Jeff Daniels being pulled by his dog Pongo from Soho Square, through Leicester Square, apparently in the wrong direction (spot the old Swiss Centre in the background), across Trafalgar Square, to Green Park via Burlington Arcade, ending up in St James's Park Lake.