Tinto Brass died in Rome yesterday morning, around half past ten. He was 93. His wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice, gave the news to ANSA, and the family wants a private funeral. Italy will remember him as the maestro of cinema erotico, the man with the cigar and the camera pointed, cheerfully and without apology, at women’s backsides. He wrote a little book in praise of the subject, Elogio del culo, and he meant every word of it.

Twenty years. That’s roughly the window between Truffaut’s first feature and Buñuel’s last, and European cinema has never been this good, this varied or this sure of itself since. The French New Wave tore up the studio rulebook, Jean-Pierre Melville turned the gangster film into something close to ritual, and the Italians, Swedes, Germans and Spaniards each found their own way to make pictures nobody in Hollywood would have dared to.

John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out in 1974 and has been adapted twice. Once in 1979 as a seven-part BBC series with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Once in 2011 as a film directed by Tomas Alfredson, with Gary Oldman in the role. Both are good. One of them understands the book. The story is simple to state and hard to tell. There’s a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence, the Circus.

A yellow book cover gave Italian crime fiction a name. Later, that same word travelled into film culture and acquired a narrower, more unsettling meaning for audiences outside Italy. The journey from a publisher’s shelf to a darkened cinema is a good story in itself, and it tells us something about the slippery way genres grow. In 1929 Mondadori launched a line of detective novels in distinctive yellow covers. The early list brought translated crime fiction to Italian readers, including S.

More than six decades separate Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) and Ben Affleck’s Animals (2026), yet both begin with the same terrible predicament. A wealthy man learns that his son has been kidnapped and that the ransom threatens everything he has built. Then comes the reversal: the kidnappers have taken the wrong child. His own son is safe. A poorer family’s child is in danger, and saving him will come at a tremendous personal cost.

Jeffrey Archer died last night at 86. He sold more than 300 million books, and he never once pretended to be anything other than what he was: a man who wanted you to turn the page. That sounds like a small ambition. It isn’t. Plenty of literary novelists have spent careers trying to hold a reader the way Archer held millions of them on trains, on beaches, in hospital waiting rooms.

Netflix put all seven episodes of East of Eden online on October 1. Zoe Kazan adapted it, which closes a family loop of sorts: her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film with James Dean, and that film used only the last stretch of Steinbeck’s novel. Lee doesn’t appear in it at all. The series takes the whole thing, from 1862 to 1918. Tracy Letts plays Cyrus Trask, with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist as his sons, Adam and Charles.

Heaven has a numbers problem. Hardly anyone passes the entrance exam any more, intake has dried up, and management is close to writing the whole century off. Hell has the opposite trouble, which is overcrowding. Then a woman on Earth prays for her son, a boxer with a bad past and a head injury that could kill him, and both head offices scramble a field agent to go get him.

I don’t like this argument when other people make it. The claim that a book or a film degrades the race, that it hands ammunition to the other side, that it should have been made differently for the good of the group, has an ugly record. It was used against Richard Wright for writing Bigger Thomas, and against Zora Neale Hurston for not writing him, by critics equally sure of themselves.

My copy is the Penguin film tie-in, secondhand, cover soft at the corners, Ben Kingsley’s face floating over a block of hot orange. Usually a tie-in edition is a warning sign. It means the book is being sold on the back of a film, and the film is generally the reason nobody bothers with the book afterwards. This one is the exception. The novel is very good and the film is very good, and they are good in different enough ways that neither spoils the other.