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Review:
I recall seeing the menacing marquee for
this film in the tunnel-hallway from Planet Hollywood to the General Cinema
14 at the Minnesota Mall of America. I thought, maybe this is something like
my own experience in Basic Training during the Vietnam era.
Hardly!
Again, congratulations to Steven
Spielberg, Nick Katzenberg, and David Geffen for forming Dreamworks, an
ambitious movie studio that will produce big films on major, often difficult,
political and social issues (as well as light kiddie fare) as viewed
in a historical perspective. Their ambition is like mine, multiplied by
several orders of magnitude.
And Spielberg continues the legacy he
started with Schindler's List.
Much has been made of the graphic
depiction of the D-Day invasion, a knife-edge turning point of our own
history. Spielberg himself insists this is not suitable for children or even
younger teens. You see a soldier vomiting from seasickness in the "Let 'em Rip"
crossover of the English Channel. You see a soldier with his furrowed,
pinkish intestines hanging out of his exposed lower torso, while he is still
conscious for triage. (He will be left to die.) You see a soldier get hit on
his steel pot with a bullet, take the pot off and then get shot, dead-center
forehead, Born Losers style.
Later, we do get into the characters.
Tom Hanks plays a married English teacher, and a kind of Everyman from
English lit. (and brighter than Forrest Gump). Private Ryan himself is
played by a charismatic Matt Damon, who hasn't lost any edge from Rainmaker or Good
Will Hunting (Damon's own opus, with Affleck). Ryan doesn't want to
go back home until he finishes his duty to his country. And he performs with
great honor in the final battle over a bridge, and then does go back.
This brings me to the two main points of
the story. Younger generations do not experience how their personal freedoms
were enabled by the sacrifices of members of my father's generation. And
these were sacrifices forced upon young men by the state. If you didn’t hit
that beachhead, you could be court-martialed and shot for cowardice. But most
young men of that generation saw "going" as a mark of manly honor,
a rite of passage, a requirement of their dominion.
The other point is that a young man
might have more right to his own life if he had the compelling family
associations - being the only surviving child. In the story, of course,
Ryan's three brothers have all been killed in action within a few days. The
value of life itself in that generation depended upon family situation, in a
way some people find hard to believe today.
One technical question: why does
Spielberg avoid wide-screen (Panavision) format in portraying his visions?
Schindler’s List (1993,
Universal/Amblin, dir. Steven Spielberg, 195 min, R) brings back memories of
some years back when Hollywood would make serious, epic historical theater
films about major issues. And this film is mostly in black-and-white. Oskar
Schindler (Liam Neeson), a Gentile German businessman in Nazi Germany,
starts a factory in which he hires Jews, and then turns his place into a
refuge. Along the way there are harrowing scenes of roundups and
concentration camps. You see the ordinary items like shoes and leather
briefcases thrown into heaps. In one scene, there is a splash of red as a
little girl tries to escape a roundup. In another scene, an SS officer target
practices on concentration camp prisoners for sport. At the end, the film
turns to color for a modern day memorial. Includes Ben Kingsley and Ralph
Fiennes.
I visited the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau in
May 1999, on foot, alone, going through the prison buildings with exhibits of
everyday items, after a night train ride to Poland from Berlin, “to the
East,” a bizarre experience. My own DADT black-and-white cover has that
barren look that I used to call a “Schindler’s List” look.
The Aryan Couple (2005, Hemdale/Celebration/Atlantic,
dir. John Daly, UK/Hungary, 120 min). The film starts with a visual tour of
Auschwitz-Bikernau today, which I visited on foot in May 1999. It then
settles into the story, to which I was drawn by the title: what would it have
been like to live as a Gentile in that society and wonder where the values
were headed. Actually, it’s too late for that. It’s 1944 in Hungary, and the
Aryan couple is really a young Jewish husband and pregnant wife Hans and
Ingrid Vassman (Kenny Doughty and Caroline Carver) “passing” to get
along and spy on the enemy. They work as servants for Joseph and Rachel Krauzenberg,
who are being forced by the Nazis to give up all of their estate and art collection
for safe passage to Palestine. Things come to a head when Himmler (Danny
Webb, who rather looks like Hitler himself) Edelhein and Eichmann
invite themselves to a final dinner, a kind of last supper, catered by the
couple. At one point, Himmler says of the Jews, “there is no country than can
take many of you.” Then the couple is “caught,” by ingeniously manipulates
German soldiers and bureaucrats into letting them escape to Switzerland,
including one climatic scene at a train border crossing. There are a couple
of mildly homoerotic probes of Hans by German soldiers. This is a gripping
film, and I am surprised it was not picked up by a larger distributor (how
about The Weinstein Company?)
Your Unknown
Brother (“Dein unbekannter Bruder”,
1982, Ice Storm/DEFA, dir. Ulrich Weiss, 115 min, sug. PG-13) is a rare
film that shows the world of 1935 Germany for Gentile Germans. What was it
like living in improving prosperity with a seductive totalitarianism that
offered a belief of superiority? This is a journey to another dominion, a
rather cold, boxy world of small shops and apartments and dark furniture,
stone buildings and cobble streets and little sunshine. A projectionist
Arnold Clausen (Uwe Kockisch) has been released from prison for
association with Communism and tries to keep a low profile. But he is
befriended by Walter (Michael Gwisdek) who offers him a future job as a
guard and draws him into a private world that has its dangers. There are
hints that Michael (whose family consists of a monkey and a turtle) is gay.
Eventually other companions fall under the spell of the Gestapo, including
his unknown brother. The last scene of the film is a gulag on a North Sea
marsh (the film is shot near Hamburg).
Before the Fall ("NaPolA", Constantin / PictureThis!, dir.
Dennis Gansel, 2004, R, 110 min, Germany) gives an even deeper look at
life for Germans in Nazi Germany. An ambitious teenage boy Friedrich Weimer
(Max Reimelt) forges a signature to get around his working class
father's wishes that he apprentice the family business and goes to the
National Political Academy after getting in because of boxing skills and
because he "measures" according to racial standards. He befriends
Albrecht (Tom Schilling), whose own father is at the Academy, creating
complications after they spend a night hunting Russian POW's and children are
killed. Albrecht's father makes him write an essay when Albrecht chokes at
having to do that, and then there is an ice water swimming test . When
Max loses a boxing match, he is kicked out. The movie does demonstrate the
ideology that made "superiority" itself a virtue, and how it falls
on its own sword. But some of the scenes mimic our own values today to a
shocking degree.
Triumph of the
Will ("Triumph
des Willens",1934,Connoisseur-Meridian,dir. Leni Riefenstahl,
110 min) is an infamous propaganda live film of one of Hitler's rallies in
Nuremburg in 1934. On one level it is "offensive" but one can try
to learn a lot about the sociology and mass psychology that allowed Hitler
his asymmetric takeover of an advanced country. In sharp black-and-white and
all on location, it is a "you are there" glimpse of another world
that almost seems like another planet. You see the mass rallies and the
uniform angular salutes to Hitler, and the mass conformity, masked by a
curious veneer of mysticism. The pitch seems to be a uniform kind of
nationalism: if you were a legitimate "Aryan" "Christian"
("Holy Roman Empire") German, you were equal to everyone
else. The term national socialism is almost an oxymoron, so extreme
that it is neither on the Left or the Right. But the equality was relative
and virtual, as toward the end Hitler talks of those among the ranks with
"superior blood" who fight harder but who
"deserve" the leadership positions. But generally, this was a
sociology of "team play" and mass participation, not one in which
one reveled at association (what I call "narcissistic upward
affiliation") with "better" (?!?) people at any kind of
individual level. Early in the film there are scenes among the Hitler Youth
(I remember a book "Education for Death: The Making of a Nazi,"
1972, by Gregor Ziemer), and there are military camp scenes of
moderate homoeroticism, with mutual bath scrubs. The film begins with a blank
screen for a minute while Wagnerian music plays, and one wonders how the
meaning of German classical music that we revere today got so corrupted;
during the film the music degenerates into boring, repetitious marches with
monotonous rhythms and tonic to dominant or subdominant harmonies. This film
makes Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" almost tolerable in
comparison.
The Great Raid (2004,
Miramax, dir. John Dahl, 132 min, R) is another rescue film in the Private
Ryan tradition. The history is the rescue of American POW’s in the largest
camp in history, at the Catanabuan Camp, of over 500 prisoners who
had somehow survived the Bataan death march. The film, although full
widescreen, is more deliberate and subtle than the Ryan film; it is a bit of
an art film, funded by Miramax Weinstein brothers. The cast includes
Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, and Joseph Fiennes. The opening and
closing show black-and-white news reels, cropped for widescreen, and the film
itself is in muted color. The first hour and a half go for drama and buildup;
they show the gamesmanship among the prisoners, the Filipinos, the medical
help, the Japanese, and the Army rangers preparing to attack.
There are scenes on an island city that
seems improbably large and varied. At a couple points, unmarried men offer
themselves as sacrifices in place a men with families, a controversial point
for today's individualistic world. The conclusion is indeed a spectacular
finale. There is one horrific scene where prisoners are executed, shot in the
back of the head in cold blood. The film stays in the island environment (set
up in Australia) and does not move back to civilization, so it seems a bit
claustrophobic.
A
Very Long Engagement (“Un long dimanche de fiancailles”)
(2004, WB-France, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie), based on
the novel by Sebastien Japrisot, 134 min, R) will compete with
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for battlefield gore and
realism, this time the Marginot line of World War I. Five French
soldiers are sent into “No Man’s Land” for intentionally wounding themselves
to get out of the trenches. One of them, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel),
is an especially gentle soul and son of a lighthouse tender (he looks a lot
like Josh Hartnett), and has been in love (all right—betrothed, a fiancé)
with polio-stricken Mathilde (Audrey Tautou). She will
go on an odyssey in Post-Great-War France to find out what happened to him.
This film becomes a spectacular period piece, filmed in Cinemascope with
tinted colors, often with a brownish tint, but with the greatest detail of
household life (down to the cat that sets fires). Slowly she pieces together
what happened on the battlefield from indirect survivors, until she is
finally reunited. The film is epic (and maybe attractive to WB for Oscar
potential)—although it seems like it belongs to the genre of Miramax’s Cold
Mountain. I think the script needed to focus more on Manech so
that you learn exactly how he could have survived from his inner strength.
One of the most shocking scenes is the field hospital underneath a hydrogen
blimp. The battlefield scenes come back all the time, with relentless
horror—this is more the reason for the R rating than anything else. There are
interesting black-and-white flashbacks (on standard screen size) also,
including one on-camera guillotining.
Paths
of Glory (1957,
MGM / United Artists, dir. Stanley Kubrick, novel by Humphrey Cobb, 87 min)
During World War I, a French general (Adoplphe Menjou) orders his men to
carry out a suicide attack. When some men refused, they are tried for
"cowardice in the face of the enemy", and Col. Dax (Kirk
Douglas) defends them. The men are picked to be tried, sometimes by lot,
sometimes because the commander believes that they are
"undesirables." Where have we heard that. Dax says
that the reason they were picked on for sacrifice is immaterial. The film is
a draft-era examination of a value system that forces young males to offer
their lives for others. Early, one soldier is asked if he "has a
wife" and he is too shell-shocked to answer. He is dispatched. The
stagecraft for the constructed trenches is interesting, and the battle
advance anticipates the filmmaking of Spielberg in Ryan, although here
everything is crisp black and white, literally and figuratively. .
Flyboys (2006, MGM
/ Electric / Elstree, dir. Tony Bill, 140 min, PG-13, UK/France) This is
the story of the Lafayette Escadrille, young American men who joined the
French Army during World War I before the United States, under Woodrow
Wilson, entered the war. Some of the men had been convicted of crimes and
left the country. One of the men is suspected of being a German spy until he
admits his bank robbery with a toy gun. Starring James Franco, Phillip
Winchester, David Ellison, Jean Reno. There are spectacular dog fights in the
air with vintage planes, and a hydrogen-filled blimp blows up. The training
camp has a young male lion that acts pretty much like a Labrador Retriever
and rough houses with the men.
The
Great Dictator (1940,
United Artists, dir. Charles Chaplin, 126 min, PG) Charley Chaplin goes way
beyond physical comedy (with which the film starts in the World War I battle
scenes) to structure a satire that tries to explain how Nazi Germany could
indeed have come about, from the level of ordinary people. I'm not sure it
works, but the film ends with a stunning speech where the Jewish barber (not
exactly Sweeney Todd) played by Chaplin gives a stunning speech when he has
been mistaken for Adenoid Hynkel (aka Adolf Hitler) while being
escorted by Commander Schultz (Reginal Gardiner) to the border of Osterich (aka
Austria) then still a "free country." The Nazis have disparaged
"democracy, liberty and equality" as protecting the weak and
unworthy, and are planning to replace this with the State which, through
absolute loyalty to its aims, would raise the people of Tomania (aka
Germany) to aesthetic perfection. (Jack Oakie plays Benzini Napolini,
aka Mussolini, dictator of Bacteria (aka Italy); Mussolini, remember, heavily
taxed bachelors!) Chaplin turns all of this upside down in his speech, in
which he says "We think too much and feel too little" and decries
technology (a lesson that could apply to today's Internet) as having become
perverted to serve false idols rather than help everyone. Is this an argument
for socialism? Not exactly, and the middle parts of the movie (in crisp black
and white) would attempt to show how Nazi ideology would have become tempting
to ordinary Germans. It's odd that "the state" can determine
worthiness or deservedness; libertarianism says that the free market does
that. The film demonstrates great (and maybe dangerous) concept, but I would
like to see it done better in a straightforward drama. It's remarkable that
this movie was made in 1940, before Pearl Harbor. If it had been made in the
late 50s, when I started high school, I wonder what the spin would have been.
The fictional circle of the movie is complete, as even the swastika is shown
as a simplified white on dark cross.
Joyeux Noel ("Merry
Christmas", 2005, Sony Pictures Classics/Nord-Ouest, dir. Christian
Carrion, France, PG-13, 116 min). During World War I, on the front lines,
there was a Christmas truce that started with music, first from the
Scottish bagpipes, and then carol singing. This incident was mentioned
in the Christmas 2006 sermon at the Washington Cathedral (one week before
President Ford's funeral there.) For a day the men exchanged stories of their
wives and kids and played games. Then the carnage had to resume. But most of
the movie sets this up and then analyzes it. Scottish, French, and German
children give speeches in their own languages depicting the enemy. Then we
are led to wonder, why are men drafted to go out and kill and fight
someone else's political battles. Toward the end, an Anglican priest gives a
sermon about the gospel of the sword, or the Great War as a crusade to kill
Germans so that they won't have to be killed again. (An ironic view of
history.) Officers are criticized, and asked what their own families will
think of their "disloyalty." The film certainly makes us examine
how we decide what is right and wrong in terms of arbitrary tribal and
national loyalties, even among people who look exactly alike. The film is
visually striking, in Scope, and starts with great vistas, many of which
probably couldn't have been on the Marginot line. Do not confuse
with an 80s film about the Pacific theater, "Merry Christmas
Mr. Lawrence."
InVincible ("Unbesiegbar,"
2001, Fine Line, dir. Werner Herzog, 135 min, prob PG-13,
UK/Germany) is another important film about personal v. public life in
pre-WWII Germany as the Nazis came to power, and about particular Jews
("Juden") who found themselves in the morally ambiguous position of
working with or for the Nazis. That sounds like a stereotyped mouthful, and
it needs to be parsed. In 1932 in Eastern Poland, Zishe Breitbart (Juoco Ahola,
possibly a Finnish name?) takes a job as a weightlifter in a local circus to
pay back a debt from a barroom brawl damage when he is insulted by
anti-Semitic slurs. Soon he finds himself invited to go to Berlin to perform
in a cabaret as a strongman. He "befriends" (not exactly) owner
Eric Jan Hanussen (Tim Roth), and gradually Hersche reveals
his dream of becoming the minister of the Occult in the new Reich. Zishe stands
up to him a couple times, however, and finds himself in the morally ambiguous
position of speaking up for what he thinks is right, v. loyalty to protecting
other people. Eventually, he makes a serious accusation and is
challenged in German court. Eric is revealed to be an imposter with various
aliases (like Hersche Steinschneider) and is actually a Jew
himself, but has embarked on a life of self-promotion, which curiously
comports with the mythical complaints that the Nazis made against his people.
There is all kind of symbolism along the
way. Zishe actually dresses up as Siegfried (with a blond wig and
steel pot) but the show presents him in analogy to the story of Samson in the
Old Testament. There are various magical tricks in the show, to the point
that Eric is quizzed about them at the trial. (In that regard, the movie
bears resemblance to "The Illusionist," where again there is a
political context.) The Mahler-like score of Hans Zimmer adds to the
emotional climate and serious tone, and the E major slow movement of the
Beethoven 3rd Piano concerto is performed in part (It is one of the longest
musical performances in the movies, other than "The Pianist"; I
wish there had been time to finish it in the closing credits).
At the end, Zishe returns to
his people in Eastern Poland. He has an accident and gets a serious leg
infection (gangrene), has an amputation, but will eventually die, just before
the Nazis come to power. There is a scene where the other people say they
believe that they have nothing to fear from Germany, because it is
demilitarized, and they fear Russia much more.
Zishe, however, believes that he can,
with an occult sensibility, anticipate the future himself, and it is bad for
his people. The Holocaust, we all know, would soon begin. He has a long
conversation with a rabbi in which the rabbi says that in any generation
there are 36 people with special gifts, and they are so sensitive that God
often delays their reward in Heaven when they pass on. So Zishe will
pass on before the Holocaust. But the idea that some people must postpone
their eternal life for the good of everyone is very curious and interesting
indeed.
This movie should not be confused about
the 2006 film by the same name from Disney, about pro football.
Flags of our
Fathers (2006,
Warner Bros./Dreamworks/Amblin, dir. Clint Eastwood, book by James Bradley
and Ron Powers, 132 min, R). The Battle of Iwo Jima, in early 1945, was a
critical battle in the Pacific and from a filmmaking point of view it offers
a vision or war and brutality that rivals the Private Ryan film
about D-Day. Not that many people know that the island is largely volcanic
and desolate, and that made Iceland a suitable location. Six men credited
with raising the flag and creating the perfect "picture" are
assigned to go stateside and raise money for war bonds, at a time when,
according to the film, the nation was drowning in debt that threatened the
loss of the war in the Pacific. It's a challenge enough to be recruited to
sell someone else's message. But here the men are bothered about what really
happened on the mountainous (Mt. Surabachi) tip of the island, where it
isn't clear which men are in the photo, and where several if the men involved
would die in subsequent brutal combat (only three made it back. The most
important acting performance is probably Adam Beach as Ira Hayes, the indian,
who faces discrimination when he is on tour and has a big drinking and
throwing up problem Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Barry Pepper
and Jamie Bell round out the young men. The story is told in flashbacks, and
runs around out of sequence as a dying old man in president constructs the
flashbacks, including a meeting with President Truman (David Patrick Kelly).
The battle scenes are in sharp sepia, almost black and white, probably to
echo the abstract style of the epic WWII films of the 60s (reviewed below).
They are recalled in little images, as when the men are served ice cream
shaped as the memorial, draped with raspberry sauce. There are a couple of
great stadium scenes: Soldier Field in Chicago (that looks like Germany
itself), and a shot of old Griffith Stadium in Washington when the Yankees
play the Senators.
The companion
film at the end of 2006 from Clint Eastwood and WB/Amblin is Letters from Iwo
Jima,
(2006, Warner Bros./Dreamworks/Amblin, 140 min, R, USA/Japan, mostly in
Japanese with subtitles, wr. Iris Yamashita) almost in black and white,
from the Japanese viewpoint. This film opened in NY and LA just in time for
the Oscars, and in the DC area is in only one theater, Landmark's
Bethesda Row, even though it is a major studio movie. In this film, the
moonscapes on the island come through in natural grays, as the film meanders
to a close like a twentieth century symphony that dies away. (The Vaughn
Williams Sixth comes to mind, but the composers are Kyle Eastwood (Clint's
son?) and Michael Stevens; the studio trademarks are silent so as not to
disrupt the audience before this film, which is a somber requiem). I did
wonder if the movie should have simply been shot in plain black-and-white.
The Cinemascope gives the images a grand scale indeed, and you live in this
movie for its 2 hours and 20 minutes, as the soldiers face their morally
defined fates. A young man grows up, kills ten of the enemy for his country
and then dies. Hopefully, he has had a chance to marry and sow his seed for a
male heir. It is all about sacrifice for collective posterity, totally
socialized heterosexuality, so vulnerable to political manipulation. The
flashbacks are interesting. In one of them, Japanese police troll the
civilian neighborhoods, and scold a woman for not having the Emperor's flag
up, and then they kill her dog (after hesitation) for making too much noise.
Another is a state dinner, where it is not yet known that America and Japan
will become enemies, and the Japanese soldier admits that his own beliefts are
the same as his country's. (My country right or wrong?) Horishi Watanabe,
Takumi Bando, Yuki Matsuzaki. Lucas Elliot makes and
interesting appearance as Sam, a casualty brought into one of the Japanese
caves.
Sands
of Iwo Jima (1949,
Republic/Artisan, dir. Allan Dwan, 109 min, sug PG) is
the obvious comparison, and the first half of the older film seems patronizing
by today's standards. It starts with John Wayne as Sgt. Stryker, looking
military enough with open neck in khakis (after the USMC hymn "From the
Halls of Montezuma") telling his men he will tell them exactly what to
do every moment. That's what basic is like. Some of the scenes do look
comical, as when one man wants a transfer because he has trouble with bayonet
and Stryker dances with him. (Nobody had imagined "don't ask don't
tell" then.) There are silly lines in combat, like "the Navy
clearing its throat." Later Stryker tells his men, "let the other
guy die for his country, you'll live for yours." Does that fit the
coming "Letters" movie above? Finally, the men land on Iwo Jima and
fight their way up for the flag raising on Mount Suribachi.
The film is interrupted with live battle scenes, but the native black and
white lacks the detail of the recent Spielberg/Eastwood films; movie making
has come that far. At the end, Stryker gets mowed down, and the men read his
letter to his son, whom he advises to protect his mother. Another man will
have to finish the letter. Is this the inspiration for Eastwood's second
film?
Go
for Broke! (1951,
MGM, dir. Robert Pirosh, 92 min) Van Johnson plays Lt. Michael Greyson who,
out of OCS, is assigned to train a company of Nisei, Japanese Americans
previously interred by volunteering to fight for the US. There is a lot of
talk that the United States military will not discriminate, which rings
rather strange in that at the time, troops were still segregated (and they
pretended to exclude men who "didn't like girls" until 1943).
At one point the Greyson tries to apologize for discriminatory
attitudes toward Italians! The small Japanese men, in a brutal campaign in
Italy and then France, turn out to be better soldiers than the officer.
To Hell and
Back (1955,
Universal, dir. Jesse Hibbs, book by Audie Murphy). Audie Murphy
plays himself as a war hero during several WWII campaigns. He had enlisted in
the Army to support younger siblings after his mother died. Eventually he
would win the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Battle
Hymn (1957,
Universal, dir. Douglas Sirk, 115 min) is an early full "CinemaScope"
picture that explores obligation to others (kids) but that which is incurred
as karma from participating in war. Col. Dean Hess (Rock Hudson) accidentally
bombs an orphanage in Germany during WWII when a bomb gets stuck. He becomes
a minister after the war but feels that his words from the pulpit are empty.
Despite his marriage (and his wife has become pregnant), he volunteers to
fight in Korea and overseas the accidental strike on a family exposed to
combat from the air. To pay back his moral debt, he sets up an orphanage for
Korean children (who actually play in the movie), but has to fight in combat
to protect them. The movie uses the famous hymn (now common with the
religious right) for emotional effect, but the script doesn't have the
subtlety of some of Sirk's other (and better) films.
Days
of Glory ("Indigenes",
2006, The Weinstein Company, dir. Rachid Bouchareb, 120 min, R, in
French) has four Muslim North African soldiers enlisting and fighting in both
North Africa and various locations in France during the liberation. The film
starts each episode with a black and white landscape (Cinemascope) that
migrates to color. I'm not sure that all of the geography is right (would
they have hiked across the Alps? Or was it the Pyrenees (once they were
already in France). Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem,
Sami Bouajila. Algeria used to be legally part of France, but
soldiers from North Africa lost their pensions in the 1950s. Of course, all
of this seems relevant to the problems with Islam in France today. The last
battle scene, where the four men have a siege in a small town, is
spectacular. At one point Said (Jamel) is asked, "Have you ever given an
order before?"
The
Tuskegee Airmen (1995,
HBO, dir. Robert Markowitz, story by Robert Williams and T.S. Cook, 106 min,
PG-13). "How do you fight for a country that thanks us with
lynching?" Gode Davis poses that question in his own project
"American Lynching". That line in the script occurs after the
African American airmen (called, with historical custom, negro) played by
Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Andre Braugher provide
cover in Italy for white dive-bombers. While taking losses themselves, they
achieve a perfect record in protecting their white-piloted raids. They've
been on a long road (including North Africa) to get there, starting when they
enlist in the segregated Army -- then the "Air Force" was the Army
Air Corps, and face word salad manipulations from whites and pseudo-science
that is not that far from that espoused by the Nazis who had become the enemy
of civilization. John Lithgow is chilling as the prejudiced Sen.
Conyers. In an early scene, one of the men worries about residual lipstick as
he gets on a steam-engine driven train. The DVD is sold in the shop at
the Smithsonian NASA museum at Dulles Airport in Chantilly, VA. There
is a stirring music score by Lee Holdridge, which holds together during
the end credits. See also "Glory".
Home
of the Brave (2006,
MGM / Millennium, dir. Mark Friedman, 105 min) did not come out until spring
2007, well after the other war films of the end of 2006, and, as a
dramatization of the domestic problems of returning Iraq war veterans, is
seemed a bit turgid. After the spectacular opening in Iraq (filmed in Morocco
-- here is where the documentary films seem more real when they are really
shot there), where Venessa Price (Jessica Biel) loses an arm in an
ambush, and Tommy Yates (Brian Presley) loses a buddy (Chad Michael Murray,
from "One Tree Hill") whom Army surgeon Will Marsh (Samuel L.
Jackson) cannot save, the last two thirds of the movie flattens into a sequence
of scenes that might work better in a stage play -- although the background
of Spokane, WA is well used. Relatively little of the politics of the Iraq
war comes into play, except in the sequence involving Marsh's son (Sam Jones
III, Clark's best friend in "Smallville"), who gets into trouble at
school with a "Buck Fush" t-shirt.
Stop-Loss (2008,
Paramount, dir. Kimberly Peirce, 112 min, R) starts with a brutal fire-fight
in Iraqi streets, under squad leader Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), with
some maimings and deaths. King comes home to Texas, distressed, are
the other surviving buddies in his unit, who behave badly, despite
exhortations from their First Sergeant to stay out of trouble (don't beat
their wives, don't have sex with underage girls). King expects to get out,
but is told when he reports that he has orders for Iraq and has been "stop-lossed".
He goes AWOL, which alienates the legal system (including a Senator) from
helping him. He almost does a Vietnam-era split to Canada, and then Mexico.
But, finally, he has to make a decision.
The movie makes
much of the unfairness of the stop-loss system, which seems to be at the
discretion of the President (who is at the receiving end of an epithet in the
movie). The stop-loss system covers up the lack of a draft, and, when
combined with graphic depictions of the maimings, amputations and casualties
(I don't know how they set these up, whether they were real as in the recent
documentary "Fighting for Life") makes a powerful political point.
You also see how far these men have migrated from the everyday civilian life
of self-promotion as many Americans know it.
The
Best Years of our Lives (1946, RKO Radio / MGM / The Samuel Goldwyn
Company /dir. William Wylor, novel by MacKinlay Kantor, 170
min) Al (Frederic March), Fred (Dana Andrews) and Homer (Harold Russell)
return home from World War II and find that the civilian world has changed
irreparably. Homer has lost both hands (they were burned off), and toward the
end of the movie there is a tender scene where his girl helps him with
everything. Fred lives in his memories of being a bombadier, and
recollects it all in a chilling scene where he walks through an field
filled with old airplanes and parts. The men find that they don't have their
jobs back, and are challenged as to whether their skills are transferrable.
Investors have to take real chances in loaning them money. The phrase
"he went up" is coined in the movie. This was a good example of
early "independent film". It's amazing that this film could
be made so quickly after the end of WWII.
In the Valley
of Elah (2007,
Warner Independent Pictures / Summit, dir., wr. Paul Haggis, 114 min, R)
The title of the movie comes from the obvious Bible story, and Goliath here
is the entire culture of the US Army, especially the underbelly of unit
cohesion and loyalty. Tommie Lee Jones plays a former Army officer Hank
Deerfield, living in Tennessee with wife (Susan Sarandon), who lost an older
son in war and whose wonderful other son has disappeared when due home at a
base in New Mexico from Iraq. He drives to the base (near Albuquerque, used in
the film -- it makes up the fictitious town of Bradford) and quickly learns
that his son was murdered and dismembered. He pressures a local police
detective (Charlize Theron) to get interested, while getting a local
computer hacker to reconstruct a cell phone record of a humvee battle
in Iraq which may have killed civilians, leading to a cover-up. There
is an early scene where Hank looks at his son's intended room, and the film
shows military barracks life closely (even the showers) as if to make a
political point about the discipline and forced intimacy. He sneaks the cell
phone out of the drawer (arranged like a foot locker for inspection). As the
case unravels, the conclusion will be quite shocking. The film recalls "A
Few Good Men," but the only good men seem to be Hank and his
son; Theron (who looks good here) plays the role analogous to Tom
Cruise in the earlier film.
The Red Badge of Courage (1951,
MGM, dir. John Huston, novel by Stephen Crane (1895), 69 min, PG). Of course,
the title of the film means a war "wound". As a film, this is
noteworthy for a flag-raising scene near the end. Having proved himself a man
finally, the Youth, Henry Fleming (Audie Murphy) raises a tattered Union
flag while a Confederate soldier with his own collapses. Maybe that scene
helped inspire the Iwo Jima movies. I read the novella in 11th Grade English
(1959). It was published when Crane was 24, and the movie contains many
quotes of narration. Crane actually self-published his first novel,
"Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." Of course, the Civil War
novel, considered naturalistic in its time, is known for its examination of
the morality of the self-sacrifice demanded of young men as a way of
"paying their dues" to society -- in an era when men could buy
their way out of the draft. Fleming flees the front lines (there are plenty
of lines where commanders order men back into the fight), and Crane's
narration calls him a "mental outcast." Behind the lines, he goes
on a miniature odyssey, encountering various wounded characters, and begins
to accept his shame. Finally, he gets punched out. Crane writes, "He had
performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man." Cowardice is
the worst of sins, ironically in a world trying to promote freedom, because
freedom is not free. In a military environment, Fleming could be convicted
and shot for desertion (not just AWOL). (I don't recall that the English
teacher in 11th grade made much of this point.) When he returns to battle, he
has redeemed himself. The movie is in black-and-white, and was obviously
filmed in California despite happening in Virginia. There are great BW
effects, however, as in a scene capturing the shimmering of a pond in
sunlight.
Is
Paris Burning? (“Paris-brule-t-il”,
1966, Paramount, dir. Rene Clement, France 173 min, wr Gore Vidal
and Francis Ford Coppola) is an extravagant film about the trials faces by
Parisians in the period just before the liberation of Paris in 1944. In
Black-and-white Cinemascope, it is artsy and gorgeous to watch in some
scenes, as when they walk into the Palace at Versailles. At the very
beginning, Hitler threatens to burn Paris to the ground. The film has an
intermission at 2/3 the way through. There is a simple march theme (including
an overture) by Maurice Jarre, that provides the background music,
and adds an atmosphere of artificiality. In the closing credits, the scenery
reverts to color, with scenes of "modern" Paris. I would not visit
Paris myself until 1999 and again in 2001 (after missing a chance in the
Ninth Grade).
The
Longest Day (1962,
20th Century Fox, dir. Darryl F. Zanuck, Ken Anakin, Andrew Marton,
Bernhard Wicki, 178 min, G) is probably the most famous film about
D-day, in crisp black-and-white CinemaScope (giving the film both
abstraction and depth, with more effect as a whole than in the later Clement
film), and docudrama style in the native languages. Many stars, including
John Wayne, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda. An interesting episode
occurs when steganograhy over the radio ("John has a long
moustache", etc.) announced the raid to the Resistance. Then there is a
train wreck near Caen that anticipates "The Fugitive." Much of the
film documents the parachute landings before the invasions. The music
score features a rhythmic leitmotif based on the first four notes of
Beethoven's Fifth. The restored digital stereo (ADD) on the DVD is outstanding.
The film was shot on location at the various beaches, some of which are near
the ancient/modern town of Bayeux with its William the Conqueror Museums,
which I visited in 1999, only to lose my rental car keys there. But I would
get to drive areas around the beaches anyway. The beach landing is as much a
spectacle as in Spielberg's film, more so because of the Scope (which Speilberg's is
not), though without the closeup guts (with some of the same
personal situations on the beaches); in fact, this movie looks like a more
typical Spielberg film to me.
Battle
of the Bulge (1965,
Warner Bros., dir. Ken Annakin, book by Philip Yordan, 170 min) is
one of the later movies to be available for single-projector Cinerama. It
depicts the last German attempt in late 1944 to recapture French and Belgian
territory. The scenery, while striking, is not accurate; the land was
probably mostly rather flat, and scenes with snow mix in with scenes that
look like desert. The train sequence before the Intermission is striking. The
movie provided an overture, intermission and exit music. The score by
Benjamin Frankel reminds one of Copland and works up to a great martial
climax at the end, with the result that the exit music (not really used for
closing credits) become superfluous.
The
Diary of Anne Frank (1959,
20th Century Fox, dir. George Stevens, black and white Cinemascope, 170 min
with a 9 minute musical overture by Alfred Newman, based on the diary by Anne
Frank and a play by Frances Goodrich) depicts a Jewish family in Amsterdam
hiding from the Nazis from mid 1943 until after D-day, when they are found,
from the point of view of a girl keeping a diary. There are family
dynamics: Anne (Millie Perkins) prefers her dad, as her mother calls her
"constipated" when she asks too many questions. The family deals
with scare food rations, with scraps shared the the family cat. In
one sequence where the cat is nibbling on a sandwich and a plate falls, the
Nazis almost find them until the cat meows and leaves the impression that
only feral "katze" are in the house. The film depicts the
horror of waiting "them" to come and make you subservient.
Memphis Belle (1990,
Warner Bros., dir. Michael Caton-Jones, dir. Monte Merrick, 107 min,
PG-13) was a famous bomber flown from England in raids over Dresden in WWII,
by a very young crew. There is one final raid, and the opportunity for danger
and heartbreak. I visited Dresden myself in 1999.
Operation
Crossbow ("The
Great Spy Mission", 1965, MGM, dir. Michael Anderson, 115 min,
UK/Germany, PG-13). This film was renamed for a while because
"Crossbow" became associated with Robin Hood. Three British spies
with German backgrounds (who have to make up their minds about what they
"believe") (George Peppard, Trevor Howard, John Mills)
infiltrate the Nazi's secret rocket test site for the doodlebug and V2
rocket. The early scenes where Hannah Reitsch (Barbara Ruttig)
tests the rocket along the Baltic Coast are interesting, and the launch
tracks are also curious to look at. The movie tends to bog down in a lot
of talk (until one Hitchcock murder with a silencer), but then picks up steam
as it visits Bavaria and then then shows the late raids on England.
The rockets were considered a threat even after much of Europe was liberated.
It has the style of the MGM widescreen epics of the
60s.
White Light,
Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007, HBO
Documentary, dir. Steven Okazaki, 85 min, R) is a graphic documentary of the
use of the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan to end World War II. It
starts in the usual historical narrative, and adds a comment to the effect
that the Japs can match our technology but that their Shinto
thinking is 2000 years behind ours. (Where do we hear that today?) It
also presents rotoscopic animated art depicting the bombings, as
well as some actual color shots of the fireballs (which as art are quite
"beautiful"; later the film will show victims fingerpainting the
bomb blast). Then the film ventures into the aftereffects of the bombing,
showing more footage (black and white and faded color) than ever before
scene. There are two surreal scenes of steam trains going through the
wasteland. The film interviews many victims in both cities, now in their 70s,
and gradually migrates to graphic photographs of their injuries, both the
scars today, and their burns and wounds shortly after the blast. The burns
are monstrous and the most graphic real wounds ever shown in film. There is
curious mention of "purple spots" from radiation poisoning; this
reminds me of the "purple spots" associated with Kaposi's Sarcoma
in AIDS. Because the scenes of radiation and blast injuries and burns are
real, they outdo the violence of "Saving Private Ryan." If this has
a theatrical release (Picturehouse), parents, be warned. Probably
not for under 16.
The Recruiter (2007, The
Film Sales Company / Propeller / HBO, dir. Edet Belznergm 87
min, PG-13) chronicles Army recruiter Clay Ulie in Houma, LA
(famous Terrebone Parish) and several soldiers through Basic. With
one female recruit, the issue of homosexuality in the military comes up
But so does the draft and the idea of "federal service" or
national service.
Band of Brothers (2001, Dreamworks/HBO,
TV series by David Frankel and Tom Hanks) premiered two days before 9/11 and
covers three brothers from D-Day to the victory in Japan. Damian Lewis, Donnie Wahlberg,
Ron Livingston. With a slow buildup.
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