Johnny Cool
When the Rat Pack minus Frank Sinatra makes a movie, it comes out Johnny Cool (1963).
That is not to say that the picture doesn't have its moments. But the over-all essence perhaps gets taken into question. Like f'instance? Allow me to explain.
First, you get William Asher as director. Remember him? He was the guy behind "I Love Lucy," "Bewitched," and "Gidget." If that suggests to you a pleasant aroma, perhaps you've stumbled into the wrong text by mistake.
Second, the executive producer is Peter Lawford, one of the least offensive and humble, albeit untalented, members of the Pack.
Then we find the usual assortment of suspects, such as Sammy Cahn as composer, theme song performed by Sammy Davis Jr., and used car salesman acted by Joey Bishop.
On the upside, we get to see pretty Elizabeth Montgomery's bare back, which is everything I imagined. We get to see Telly Savalas machine-gunned through the stomach, which is also everything I imagined.
On the very upside, an actor named Hank Henry plays a bus driver, in the process doing the all-time best Rodney Dangerfield impression of all time. We are also treated to a young Henry Silva in the title role. And therein lies the rub. Johnny begins life in Italy--fascist Italy. He watches one of Mussolini's black-shirts blow away his mom and instantly joins the resistance as the youngest guerrilla fighter in the regimen. A few years later, he has turned into a Robin Hood type character. He is the king of a town, stealing from the barons, doling out the proceeds to the week and needy. In other words, he is patterned on Fidel. The writers take a young man who battled tyranny and attempt to paint him as a corrupt communist. Corrupt? Oh sure. The Mafioso shoot and kill a guy who looks like Johnny, tell the townsfolk the real McCoy is swimming with the fish bait, and strong arm Johnny into traveling to AmerEEKa to kill off the don's unfriendly competitors.
And kill Johnny does.
In the process he hooks up with Dare Guiness, the aforementioned bareback lady with the witchy eyes. In three grueling days, she falls for the assassin and he for her. Theirs is strictly a sexual arrangement, but it seems to work, at least until she gets a parking ticket outside a beauty salon. Ah, it is there that Dare realizes that there is perhaps a wee bit improper about throwing a suitcase bomb into a swimming pool filled with a philandering oil tycoon whose kids just happen to be watching. She sells him out to the G-Men, but they're too late to save Johnny Cool from the enemies he's made among the American mobsters. The bad guys capture him and sentence him to a foul interrogation followed by a slow and painful demise.
This is one genuinely brutal film. The only light sequence is contained within a horribly tense episode where Johnny holds a gun to the temple of a craps player named Educated (Davis Jr), ordering the roller to roll a series of combinations. When Johnny says "Eleven," we're pretty sure Educated is going to bite it. His relief at succeeding is nearly hilarious. It's the only light moment in this otherwise serious and taut picture. Silva is incredible. Davis is great. Savalas is his usual nasty self. And Mort Sahl makes a cameo. A worthwhile ninety minutes.
That is not to say that the picture doesn't have its moments. But the over-all essence perhaps gets taken into question. Like f'instance? Allow me to explain.
First, you get William Asher as director. Remember him? He was the guy behind "I Love Lucy," "Bewitched," and "Gidget." If that suggests to you a pleasant aroma, perhaps you've stumbled into the wrong text by mistake.
Second, the executive producer is Peter Lawford, one of the least offensive and humble, albeit untalented, members of the Pack.
Then we find the usual assortment of suspects, such as Sammy Cahn as composer, theme song performed by Sammy Davis Jr., and used car salesman acted by Joey Bishop.
On the upside, we get to see pretty Elizabeth Montgomery's bare back, which is everything I imagined. We get to see Telly Savalas machine-gunned through the stomach, which is also everything I imagined.
On the very upside, an actor named Hank Henry plays a bus driver, in the process doing the all-time best Rodney Dangerfield impression of all time. We are also treated to a young Henry Silva in the title role. And therein lies the rub. Johnny begins life in Italy--fascist Italy. He watches one of Mussolini's black-shirts blow away his mom and instantly joins the resistance as the youngest guerrilla fighter in the regimen. A few years later, he has turned into a Robin Hood type character. He is the king of a town, stealing from the barons, doling out the proceeds to the week and needy. In other words, he is patterned on Fidel. The writers take a young man who battled tyranny and attempt to paint him as a corrupt communist. Corrupt? Oh sure. The Mafioso shoot and kill a guy who looks like Johnny, tell the townsfolk the real McCoy is swimming with the fish bait, and strong arm Johnny into traveling to AmerEEKa to kill off the don's unfriendly competitors.
And kill Johnny does.
In the process he hooks up with Dare Guiness, the aforementioned bareback lady with the witchy eyes. In three grueling days, she falls for the assassin and he for her. Theirs is strictly a sexual arrangement, but it seems to work, at least until she gets a parking ticket outside a beauty salon. Ah, it is there that Dare realizes that there is perhaps a wee bit improper about throwing a suitcase bomb into a swimming pool filled with a philandering oil tycoon whose kids just happen to be watching. She sells him out to the G-Men, but they're too late to save Johnny Cool from the enemies he's made among the American mobsters. The bad guys capture him and sentence him to a foul interrogation followed by a slow and painful demise.
This is one genuinely brutal film. The only light sequence is contained within a horribly tense episode where Johnny holds a gun to the temple of a craps player named Educated (Davis Jr), ordering the roller to roll a series of combinations. When Johnny says "Eleven," we're pretty sure Educated is going to bite it. His relief at succeeding is nearly hilarious. It's the only light moment in this otherwise serious and taut picture. Silva is incredible. Davis is great. Savalas is his usual nasty self. And Mort Sahl makes a cameo. A worthwhile ninety minutes.
Le Petit Soldat
At the time the movie was shot (1960, with a release in 1963), the French were heavily involved in maintaining dominion over Algeria. To do this, the country leaned heavily on right wing paramilitary organizations, such as the OAS (organisation de l'armee secrete). In Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier), Bruno Forestier works for such an organization. In those days the OAS was one tough bunch of mofos, happily attempting assassinations on heads of state, such as France's Charles de Gaulle. Poised against such terrorist groups were, among others, Turkish Maoist groups with, shall we say, a hard on for adhering to what they perceived to be the dictates of various Leninist and Maoist doctrines, all in the name of liberating the Algerians. I've never seen that killing for an ideal was necessarily morally superior to killing for money, considering that most ideals translate into tyranny. The French government, at that time, was simply another in a series of European thugs and despots determined to apply sixteenth century methodology to twentieth century politico-economics.
Apparently director Jean-Luc Godard (at that time, anyway) agreed because the style he brings to the plot of Le Petit Soldat recommends a despondent acceptance of a highly nasty status quo, strongly implying that only love can open a person's eyes to the stupidity of such cruelty.
The OAS guys want Bruno to murder a guy. The only reason they demand that he do this is because they want to satisfy themselves that Bruno is not a double agent. Bruno has killed for them before and might be willing to do so again. But this time he refuses. He is a right winger, he tells us, but not necessarily a nationalist. His statement is pure rationalization because we soon see that the real reason is that he suspects Veronica (played by the omnipresent Anna Karina) is on the side of the Arabs. He falls for her within five minutes. Her affections take a wee bit longer. Indeed, once Bruno is captured by the Turks, we see that Veronica is sitting in her house which is presently occupied by the same OAS men. Is she with them? Are they holding her? Or is she only pretending to be on their side while secretly working for the Arabs?
Probably a highly intuitive or very smart viewer will be able to answer all of these questions. That viewer deserves to feel mighty proud. But ultimately those questions are irrelevant and it is their very irrelevance that is the point: it doesn't matter to Godard whether one is a Little Red Book-reading Maoist or a card carrying fan of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who, by the way, is still dead), because in the end they are all the same person--they are the force that gets between the conscientious objector and his family, the force that separates two young lovers from one another, the force that separates a struggling film-maker from his audience. . .
As mentioned at the outset, Le Petit Soldat was shot in 1960 and released three years later. This is because in those days the French censors determined which films, or which part of films, would be released in France, a fact which only adds more irony to one of the director's most ironic movies.
And irony is really what the film is all about. It is ironic, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1969 review of the movie, that Bruno, driving the latest and greatest automobile, finds himself constantly thwarted while tracking his victim--who is driving a 1962 Nash Rambler!
This was Godard's next movie after Breathless. Because of the still uncomfortable torture scene, you won't want to use your furnace on no burn days. But at least no one in the movie had ever used a computer.
It's also cool that Bruno's cover is that of a photo journalist who snaps his camera at Veronica, whose cover is of a reluctant model.
This may not be the director's greatest movie. It is certainly worth your time to watch it, unless you think you're Tarantino, who reportedly feels he's "out-grown" Godard.
Apparently director Jean-Luc Godard (at that time, anyway) agreed because the style he brings to the plot of Le Petit Soldat recommends a despondent acceptance of a highly nasty status quo, strongly implying that only love can open a person's eyes to the stupidity of such cruelty.
The OAS guys want Bruno to murder a guy. The only reason they demand that he do this is because they want to satisfy themselves that Bruno is not a double agent. Bruno has killed for them before and might be willing to do so again. But this time he refuses. He is a right winger, he tells us, but not necessarily a nationalist. His statement is pure rationalization because we soon see that the real reason is that he suspects Veronica (played by the omnipresent Anna Karina) is on the side of the Arabs. He falls for her within five minutes. Her affections take a wee bit longer. Indeed, once Bruno is captured by the Turks, we see that Veronica is sitting in her house which is presently occupied by the same OAS men. Is she with them? Are they holding her? Or is she only pretending to be on their side while secretly working for the Arabs?
Probably a highly intuitive or very smart viewer will be able to answer all of these questions. That viewer deserves to feel mighty proud. But ultimately those questions are irrelevant and it is their very irrelevance that is the point: it doesn't matter to Godard whether one is a Little Red Book-reading Maoist or a card carrying fan of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who, by the way, is still dead), because in the end they are all the same person--they are the force that gets between the conscientious objector and his family, the force that separates two young lovers from one another, the force that separates a struggling film-maker from his audience. . .
As mentioned at the outset, Le Petit Soldat was shot in 1960 and released three years later. This is because in those days the French censors determined which films, or which part of films, would be released in France, a fact which only adds more irony to one of the director's most ironic movies.
And irony is really what the film is all about. It is ironic, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1969 review of the movie, that Bruno, driving the latest and greatest automobile, finds himself constantly thwarted while tracking his victim--who is driving a 1962 Nash Rambler!
This was Godard's next movie after Breathless. Because of the still uncomfortable torture scene, you won't want to use your furnace on no burn days. But at least no one in the movie had ever used a computer.
It's also cool that Bruno's cover is that of a photo journalist who snaps his camera at Veronica, whose cover is of a reluctant model.
This may not be the director's greatest movie. It is certainly worth your time to watch it, unless you think you're Tarantino, who reportedly feels he's "out-grown" Godard.
The Magic Christian
Because I never cared for the films of Blake Edwards (too obvious and far too pro status quo for my tastes), I never got around to enjoying the Pink Panther movies and as a consequence I dismissed a lot of the work of Peter Sellers. That does not mean that I lacked appreciation for the actor's best works, such as Dr. Strangelove and Being There. What it does mean is that I often questioned Mr. Sellers' judgment. That's all. So when it came time for me to reevaluate the film The Magic Christian, I didn't know quite what to think. On the one hand, starring Sellers and Ringo Starr, with cameos by Raquel Welsh, Roman Polanski, and Richard Attenborough, with a script by the brilliant satirist Terry Southern, with contributions by some of the guys who would soon become Monty Python, and with a soundtrack by Badfinger,the bloody thing could hardly seem to miss. And yet for some reason I recollected not caring much for it when I first saw it as a wee bit of a lad upon its initial release way back in December 1969.
Rest assured, my cocoon worshipers and friends of many-colored nomads, time has only improved the quality of the humor which constructs The Magic Christian, a film with the revealing tagline "The Magic Christian is: antiestablishmentarian, antibellum, antitrust, antiseptic, antibiotic, antisocial & antipasto."
The storyline really doesn't matter all that much, as you may have guessed. The premise, however, is that Guy Grand, played by Sellers, asserts that anyone can be bought for a price. Okay. Money sucks, especially if you've a lot of it and have the safe perspective of being insulated. But, wait! Isn't that Ringo playing a bum sleeping in the grass? Why, yes, I believe it is, and that suggests that the Beatles drummer really was, as everyone said in those days, the best actor of the bunch. He actually was a mighty fine study of a fellow, and no one should ever take that accomplishment away from him, other than to add that despite Caveman, Ringo actually is a first rate thespian in his own right and needn't be compared to other musicians for his credentials.
The only reason to watch the 92-minute feature film these days, it stands to argue, is that Starr and Sellers work so well together that it is almost possible to believe that the two real life hipsters were indeed related, if not to one another, then to someone, for certain. The actual skits that loosely construct the film haven't aged particularly well, and the plot, as I say, is a tired one now, as it was forty-odd years back, although fans of Python will probably find something there to amuse themselves and rightly so.
Aside from the comedic brilliance of the two main stars, the other reason to lap up this film like milk on a doorstep (if one were a cat, that is) is because of the truth of the tagline. I can't speak to the anti-pasta sentiments, but it certainly was and remains everything else on that list of words and even to this very day in this very new year resounds with disrespect for the stalest elements of the pablum and pap that the 1970s would stomp the guts out of, such as the nauseating mainstream musicals, of which My Fair Lady was perhaps the most abominable example. The perversity of mediocrity and their merchants did not die easily, of course, and so we would soon enough find ourselves swallowed up in the reactionary swill of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Grease and all the other spoiled cream that the squares imagined the 1960s were really about. The Magic Christian is simply a fish slammed against the face of people leaving the theatre asking (as many did when presented with genuine brilliance, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey), "What the bleeding hell is this movie about?" The very framework of a motion picture having a beginning, middle and end, in the Aristotelian sense of plot and progress, was one which movie-makers did not presume to universally accept. You could not make The Magic Christian today any more than you could make 2001, specifically because Guy Grand was correct: people do have their price and can be seduced into selling out. That, it seems, is the precise reason why I hope that someone will try.
Rest assured, my cocoon worshipers and friends of many-colored nomads, time has only improved the quality of the humor which constructs The Magic Christian, a film with the revealing tagline "The Magic Christian is: antiestablishmentarian, antibellum, antitrust, antiseptic, antibiotic, antisocial & antipasto."
The storyline really doesn't matter all that much, as you may have guessed. The premise, however, is that Guy Grand, played by Sellers, asserts that anyone can be bought for a price. Okay. Money sucks, especially if you've a lot of it and have the safe perspective of being insulated. But, wait! Isn't that Ringo playing a bum sleeping in the grass? Why, yes, I believe it is, and that suggests that the Beatles drummer really was, as everyone said in those days, the best actor of the bunch. He actually was a mighty fine study of a fellow, and no one should ever take that accomplishment away from him, other than to add that despite Caveman, Ringo actually is a first rate thespian in his own right and needn't be compared to other musicians for his credentials.
The only reason to watch the 92-minute feature film these days, it stands to argue, is that Starr and Sellers work so well together that it is almost possible to believe that the two real life hipsters were indeed related, if not to one another, then to someone, for certain. The actual skits that loosely construct the film haven't aged particularly well, and the plot, as I say, is a tired one now, as it was forty-odd years back, although fans of Python will probably find something there to amuse themselves and rightly so.
Aside from the comedic brilliance of the two main stars, the other reason to lap up this film like milk on a doorstep (if one were a cat, that is) is because of the truth of the tagline. I can't speak to the anti-pasta sentiments, but it certainly was and remains everything else on that list of words and even to this very day in this very new year resounds with disrespect for the stalest elements of the pablum and pap that the 1970s would stomp the guts out of, such as the nauseating mainstream musicals, of which My Fair Lady was perhaps the most abominable example. The perversity of mediocrity and their merchants did not die easily, of course, and so we would soon enough find ourselves swallowed up in the reactionary swill of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Grease and all the other spoiled cream that the squares imagined the 1960s were really about. The Magic Christian is simply a fish slammed against the face of people leaving the theatre asking (as many did when presented with genuine brilliance, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey), "What the bleeding hell is this movie about?" The very framework of a motion picture having a beginning, middle and end, in the Aristotelian sense of plot and progress, was one which movie-makers did not presume to universally accept. You could not make The Magic Christian today any more than you could make 2001, specifically because Guy Grand was correct: people do have their price and can be seduced into selling out. That, it seems, is the precise reason why I hope that someone will try.
Judgment at Nuremberg
Is Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) the most important film ever made?
This movie, directed by Stanley Kramer and written by Abby Mann, uses courtroom drama to do much more than emphasize the cruelty and inhumanity of four judges during the reign of Germany's Third Reich. This motion picture brings forth ideas, ideas which are every bit as challenging this very day as they were when the film first appeared in theaters.
The most crucial of these ideas concerns personal responsibility. You may have heard the famous quote: "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." Those words were spoken by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and anti-communist who had initially supported Hitler and national socialism. Eventually the Nazis did come for him, arresting him for not being enthusiastic enough about the Third Reich.
Personal responsibility. Those are a pair of heavy words. What would we do today if something similar were to happen? Or are questions such as this too negative, threatening as they do to squelch our insular community of enlightened hipsters who are, after all, only trying to make an honest buck to spend at the local concert venue?
The question is important because we can no longer ask it of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the fictional character in the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here. Yet his ilk surrounds us, permeates our culture and dips its oily hands into our collective soup every day. Our response? Well, things are still better here than they are elsewhere, and besides, "Law and Order SVU" comes on in half an hour.
The time has come, my friends, to call us all out. Our lackadaisical fascination with dumb TV, our emotional investment in stupid consumerism, our insistence on evaluating ourselves based on such intangibles as race, color, gender, age, religion--these are the evidence--admissible in the courtroom of the blog--that declare our people guilty of that greatest of all crimes against humanity: a wasted life.
Goddammit, all we have for certain is this festering boil of an existence that we call living. To turn our backs to the evil that never quite goes away is a betrayal of our duty to ourselves. Whenever we smirk at the misfortune of someone weaker than ourselves, we are hoisting coal onto the fire of that evil. We are responsible, goddammit, and to deny that is to deny the essence of that one thing that makes us human beings in the first place, that one thing understood and expressed so well by the poet John Donne, when he wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
This is not a matter of personal choice. This is an obligation to the truth, one which only a fool can reject, and at his own peril, as well as at the peril of us all.
The Nazis rejected this obligation and that is part of what pitted them against the natural way of things, a way which they claimed they embraced, but only after they sought to pervert it in every way imaginable.
The United States held twelve trials in Nuremberg after World War II. The defendants in the trials were sixteen judges and lawyers. One of these men committed suicide rather than face his accusers. Another was freed as the result of a mistrial. Of the remaining fourteen, ten were found guilty and four were exonerated.
The cast of actors in the film based on one of those trials is a list of some of the greatest visual artists in the history of the medium, including Spencer Tracy as the chief judge, Burt Lancaster as an initially un-recalcitrant Nazi, Richard Widmark as the military prosecutor, Marlene Dietrich as the widow of the man whose home the judge has been assigned to reside in, Judy Garland as a reluctant and occasionally hateful witness, and Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Peterson, a victim of Nazi sterilization in a performance on which anyone would be proud to hang a career. Perhaps best of all, we get Maximilian Schell as the embodiment of blind servitude and brutal beauty in the role of the evil defense attorney.
Judgment at Nuremberg was not, as is commonly opined, the first U.S. film with the Holocaust as its subject matter. For that you would have to go back to 1946 and check out Orson Welles' movie The Stranger. You probably shouldcheck it out. Then in 1948 Montgomery Clift starred in the very fine Holocaust film, The Search. There was even an idiotic musical made about the Holocaust in 1956 called Singing in the Dark--and this film was so bad that it's no wonder you've not heard of it. Three years later we were all gathered to weep over The Diary of Anne Frank--and weep we did. But of these films, only the one directed by Welles had a smidgen of an idea attached to it and this is where Kramer's brilliance lifts it head in pride.
Were the four judges in this--the third trial--culpable? Or were they merely saving themselves from persecution as did so many others who were never tried? Were they maintaining an adherence to actual laws on the books and hence remaining loyal to the fatherland? Or were they cowards and traitors to the people of their country for refusing to say NO? Did not the finest legal minds in the history of the great United States--such as Oliver Wendell Holmes (who is quoted liberally)--likewise endorse and even advocate the use of eugenics and sterilization as a hedge against the encroachment of undesirables? These are more than mere questions. Whenever someone today asks if the policy of detaining accused at Guantanamo is righteous or vile, that is more than a question. Whenever we ponder why the particular "they" of the moment hate us and yearn for our destruction, that is more than curiosity. Whenever a child asks his parents why they refer to a man as a nigger behind his back and call him Fred to his face, that is more than insipidity or naivete. These are all ideas and today, just as in 1961, just as in 1933-1945, ideas can get you killed. In that context, Judgment at Nuremberg earns its longevity as one of the greatest American films because it is so bloody dangerous. And that is a very good thing in these tired and stupid times in which we live.
So, is it the most important film ever made? Only a willful ignorance of those times and these can hold out against such a judgment for long.
This movie, directed by Stanley Kramer and written by Abby Mann, uses courtroom drama to do much more than emphasize the cruelty and inhumanity of four judges during the reign of Germany's Third Reich. This motion picture brings forth ideas, ideas which are every bit as challenging this very day as they were when the film first appeared in theaters.
The most crucial of these ideas concerns personal responsibility. You may have heard the famous quote: "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." Those words were spoken by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and anti-communist who had initially supported Hitler and national socialism. Eventually the Nazis did come for him, arresting him for not being enthusiastic enough about the Third Reich.
Personal responsibility. Those are a pair of heavy words. What would we do today if something similar were to happen? Or are questions such as this too negative, threatening as they do to squelch our insular community of enlightened hipsters who are, after all, only trying to make an honest buck to spend at the local concert venue?
The question is important because we can no longer ask it of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the fictional character in the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here. Yet his ilk surrounds us, permeates our culture and dips its oily hands into our collective soup every day. Our response? Well, things are still better here than they are elsewhere, and besides, "Law and Order SVU" comes on in half an hour.
The time has come, my friends, to call us all out. Our lackadaisical fascination with dumb TV, our emotional investment in stupid consumerism, our insistence on evaluating ourselves based on such intangibles as race, color, gender, age, religion--these are the evidence--admissible in the courtroom of the blog--that declare our people guilty of that greatest of all crimes against humanity: a wasted life.
Goddammit, all we have for certain is this festering boil of an existence that we call living. To turn our backs to the evil that never quite goes away is a betrayal of our duty to ourselves. Whenever we smirk at the misfortune of someone weaker than ourselves, we are hoisting coal onto the fire of that evil. We are responsible, goddammit, and to deny that is to deny the essence of that one thing that makes us human beings in the first place, that one thing understood and expressed so well by the poet John Donne, when he wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
This is not a matter of personal choice. This is an obligation to the truth, one which only a fool can reject, and at his own peril, as well as at the peril of us all.
The Nazis rejected this obligation and that is part of what pitted them against the natural way of things, a way which they claimed they embraced, but only after they sought to pervert it in every way imaginable.
The United States held twelve trials in Nuremberg after World War II. The defendants in the trials were sixteen judges and lawyers. One of these men committed suicide rather than face his accusers. Another was freed as the result of a mistrial. Of the remaining fourteen, ten were found guilty and four were exonerated.
The cast of actors in the film based on one of those trials is a list of some of the greatest visual artists in the history of the medium, including Spencer Tracy as the chief judge, Burt Lancaster as an initially un-recalcitrant Nazi, Richard Widmark as the military prosecutor, Marlene Dietrich as the widow of the man whose home the judge has been assigned to reside in, Judy Garland as a reluctant and occasionally hateful witness, and Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Peterson, a victim of Nazi sterilization in a performance on which anyone would be proud to hang a career. Perhaps best of all, we get Maximilian Schell as the embodiment of blind servitude and brutal beauty in the role of the evil defense attorney.
Judgment at Nuremberg was not, as is commonly opined, the first U.S. film with the Holocaust as its subject matter. For that you would have to go back to 1946 and check out Orson Welles' movie The Stranger. You probably shouldcheck it out. Then in 1948 Montgomery Clift starred in the very fine Holocaust film, The Search. There was even an idiotic musical made about the Holocaust in 1956 called Singing in the Dark--and this film was so bad that it's no wonder you've not heard of it. Three years later we were all gathered to weep over The Diary of Anne Frank--and weep we did. But of these films, only the one directed by Welles had a smidgen of an idea attached to it and this is where Kramer's brilliance lifts it head in pride.
Were the four judges in this--the third trial--culpable? Or were they merely saving themselves from persecution as did so many others who were never tried? Were they maintaining an adherence to actual laws on the books and hence remaining loyal to the fatherland? Or were they cowards and traitors to the people of their country for refusing to say NO? Did not the finest legal minds in the history of the great United States--such as Oliver Wendell Holmes (who is quoted liberally)--likewise endorse and even advocate the use of eugenics and sterilization as a hedge against the encroachment of undesirables? These are more than mere questions. Whenever someone today asks if the policy of detaining accused at Guantanamo is righteous or vile, that is more than a question. Whenever we ponder why the particular "they" of the moment hate us and yearn for our destruction, that is more than curiosity. Whenever a child asks his parents why they refer to a man as a nigger behind his back and call him Fred to his face, that is more than insipidity or naivete. These are all ideas and today, just as in 1961, just as in 1933-1945, ideas can get you killed. In that context, Judgment at Nuremberg earns its longevity as one of the greatest American films because it is so bloody dangerous. And that is a very good thing in these tired and stupid times in which we live.
So, is it the most important film ever made? Only a willful ignorance of those times and these can hold out against such a judgment for long.
Five Minutes to Live
Five Minutes to Live (1961) stars Johnny Cash as kind of a combination of Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and James Cagney if all three of them had spent sack time with Charles Starkweather, which is to say he is so incredibly bad that no amount of mourning will ever make you worry about poor old Johnny again. His role, and the whole damned film, for that matter, was written by the sensational Cay Forrester (who years later I incorrectly assumed was the focus of the otherwise tepidFinding Forrester, even though it turned out to be Sean Connery instead), who had been featured in a wild number of low budget drive-in flicks since way back in 1943 when she hit the screen in Blazing Guns. And, no, you don't want to bother checking that one out, although I promise that you'll have tombstone nightmares if you dare to peek in at Five Minutes to Live.
Vic Tayback hires desolate Johnny to help him pull off a smart bank job. Johnny likes the idea and shoots his girlfriend in the throat just to prove it. Dangling Larynx John shows up at the bank VP's house and holds the Mrs hostage while Tayback shakes down the suit back at the bank. If you think you saw this same idea years later in 1974's Peter Fonda gyp Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, you're right, except here the terror is real and not played for laughs. What it is played for is a timely attack on suburbia, with all its schedules, PTA meetings, porcelain, and little boys who look like Opie Taylor, who actually is in the movie. Johnny Cash is one-and-a-half scary mofos and he plays the role almost as well as he sings at Folsom, which is to say pretty damned well. Tayback is understated and authentic and Cay Forrester, who plays the hostage wife, well, she sure wrote a dandy screenplay, let's put it that way.
This movie is more anti-establishment than a whole decade's worth of Jefferson Airplane albums and mocks bourgeois values better than old Truffaut himself.
Vic Tayback hires desolate Johnny to help him pull off a smart bank job. Johnny likes the idea and shoots his girlfriend in the throat just to prove it. Dangling Larynx John shows up at the bank VP's house and holds the Mrs hostage while Tayback shakes down the suit back at the bank. If you think you saw this same idea years later in 1974's Peter Fonda gyp Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, you're right, except here the terror is real and not played for laughs. What it is played for is a timely attack on suburbia, with all its schedules, PTA meetings, porcelain, and little boys who look like Opie Taylor, who actually is in the movie. Johnny Cash is one-and-a-half scary mofos and he plays the role almost as well as he sings at Folsom, which is to say pretty damned well. Tayback is understated and authentic and Cay Forrester, who plays the hostage wife, well, she sure wrote a dandy screenplay, let's put it that way.
This movie is more anti-establishment than a whole decade's worth of Jefferson Airplane albums and mocks bourgeois values better than old Truffaut himself.
Cul de Sac
Cul-de-Sac (1966) is the second Roman Polanski feature to be made in English. Watching this sparkling black and white motion picture, it is possible to at last comprehend how humor and horror can work together. If you think about some of the most intensely frightening movies you've ever seen, I'll bet most of the better ones had strong elements of often confusing humor in them. The Shining comes to mind, where Jack Torrance's mimicry of his wife's terror itself becomes terrifying, especially because the sarcasm misdirects us into anticipating a relief, only to get a knotted fist right in the stomach. In Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, there is the memorable scene in the diner where the professorial spinster berates Tippi Hedren for alarming the locals while a drunk in the corner keeps repeating, with mock-seriousness, "It's the end of the world," which, of course, it is. Yet no movie I can think of manages to layer the absurdist humor of Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett onto a platter of domestic horror even remotely as well as Polanski has done with Cul-de-Sac.
The film stars Donald Pleasence as George, a pompous yet vulnerable upper-middle-class pre-retiree who has sold everything he owns to buy a castle for himself and his wife Teresa, the latter played with an intense and lively authenticity by Françoise Dorléac, the older and strikingly beautiful sister of Catherine Deneuve. This couple has quite the strained relationship, what with the two of them living on Holy Island amidst ten million chickens, roosters and eggs, the island being surrounded, as islands tend to be, by lots and lots of water. But the water only cuts them off from the rest of civilization during high tide. The rest of the time people seem to come and go, speaking of everything except Michelangelo.
One of the comers is Lionel Stander, who works out a sensational version of Dickie, a criminal with a voice like that of a frog that swallowed a sheet of sandpaper. Dickie and his mortally wounded friend Albie are on the run from a crime that we never learn anything about. Heck, we're not even certain it is a crime. All we know is that Dickie thinks George and Teresa are a handful of idiots. He's using her to prove something to himself and she's using him--period.
Stander mocks the pretensions of George and Teresa's lifestyle, yet manages to imitate it flawlessly when he pretends to be a servant upon the arrival of some of George's so-called friends. Dickie thinks everyone on the island is nuts, and he may be right.
The film stars Donald Pleasence as George, a pompous yet vulnerable upper-middle-class pre-retiree who has sold everything he owns to buy a castle for himself and his wife Teresa, the latter played with an intense and lively authenticity by Françoise Dorléac, the older and strikingly beautiful sister of Catherine Deneuve. This couple has quite the strained relationship, what with the two of them living on Holy Island amidst ten million chickens, roosters and eggs, the island being surrounded, as islands tend to be, by lots and lots of water. But the water only cuts them off from the rest of civilization during high tide. The rest of the time people seem to come and go, speaking of everything except Michelangelo.
One of the comers is Lionel Stander, who works out a sensational version of Dickie, a criminal with a voice like that of a frog that swallowed a sheet of sandpaper. Dickie and his mortally wounded friend Albie are on the run from a crime that we never learn anything about. Heck, we're not even certain it is a crime. All we know is that Dickie thinks George and Teresa are a handful of idiots. He's using her to prove something to himself and she's using him--period.
Stander mocks the pretensions of George and Teresa's lifestyle, yet manages to imitate it flawlessly when he pretends to be a servant upon the arrival of some of George's so-called friends. Dickie thinks everyone on the island is nuts, and he may be right.
Polanski, who directed and co-wrote the script, utilized cinematographer Gilbert Taylor to outstanding effect. Even in the uncomfortable close-ups of Pleasence, the result is as revealing as an Annie Leibovitz photograph.
This is a film for the ages. Nothing here is topical or lost within a melange of hipness. On the contrary, the values are straight out of a Utah bank depository. As the audience, we are in on the joke from the second reel, but by the end we begin to suspect that we are the joke. That the visitor Dickie waits for never quite arrives is only half the fun.
This is a film for the ages. Nothing here is topical or lost within a melange of hipness. On the contrary, the values are straight out of a Utah bank depository. As the audience, we are in on the joke from the second reel, but by the end we begin to suspect that we are the joke. That the visitor Dickie waits for never quite arrives is only half the fun.
Pressure Point
"The enemy is always fascism" -- Mort Sahl, comedian, speechwriter, smart guy.
"I use the enemy." -- Johnny Rotten, singer, loudmouth, smart guy.
"I use the enemy." -- Johnny Rotten, singer, loudmouth, smart guy.
I write most of these entries as quickly as I can so as to capture and communicate the psychological rhythms of my personal creative process, the idea being that those of you who tune in regularly perhaps share some alpha and beta waves with Your Humble Narrator. Admittedly there have been some exceptions, such as the pieces on nuclear power and the pair of overly long and far too academic treatises on the histories of fascism. For the most part, however, these articles fly from my brain to the electronic page in mere minutes, despite the occasional stumble for research purposes and--believe it or not--fact checking.
This particular entry, untitled as I write it--will take longer, I suspect.
In my heart, I believe that Philmer is not the forum for self-analysis. First of all, that type of thing is all too often precious. Secondly, I'd rather write about movies, or music, or even the ghastly specter of politics. Yes, I am aware that I have on several occasions lured you, Tonstant Weader, into dipping your big toe into the unsettled pond of my life via many a heartfelt story of destitution, delirium or delight. I have, however, always been most studious in pulling back so that I wasn't required to crack open the nut to find out what was inside. That would have been unpleasant. That would also have made for much more interesting reading. For that deliberate omission, I apologize, at least this once.
All the same, I still plan to have as much of my own way as possible. I will use the occasion of my viewing of the spectacular Pressure Point (1962) as the jumping off point for a bit of the old self-psychoanalysis. I realize that could end up being the most self-indulgent bore in the history of the world. Yet somehow I suspect you will not drift off. I'm sure of it. We all know one another by now.
Without going into the specifics of it just yet, I will tell you that Pressure Point makes the dramatic argument that fascism is a form of serious mental illness. As ideas go, that's one big head full of snakes. Imagine, if you will, that all those goosestepping neanderthals who fell under the charm of Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels were actually just a bunch of psychologically diseased middle class stooges with that once in a lifetime opportunity to act out their antisocial compulsions within a system where to do otherwise would, paradoxically, be antisocial. Think about it. You take your typical German merchant class Aryan, circa 1935. He's been projecting his own insecurities onto the concept of enterprise and nationhood for as long as he can remember. Then his country and his enterprise gets the shit kicked out of them by a war. He is left with two broad options. He can conclude that his entire personal philosophy, which guided his behavior, has always been ridiculous, or he can blame someone else, some grandiose group of conspirators, for wrecking his dreams. As Nietzsche wrote, "My memory says I did that. My pride says I cannot have done that. Eventually, memory yields."
This is essentially the argument made by the movie Pressure Point, the fascinating film to which we will eventually get around to discussing in some detail. Before we do, however, this subject requires a bit of digging.
One of the ideas that has rolled around in my own mind for years now is that mental illness, like mental health, is actually a spot on a continuum, a spot that often re-positions itself based on circumstance. When external stress is minimal, the individual will typically suffer less psychiatric symptoms. But introduce heavy stress--whether real or imagined--into his life, and the individual will find his needle sliding steadily into the danger zone of psychosis. What I am suggesting is that each person, through a likely blend of socio-biological factors, has a given predisposition to aberrant thoughts, most often manifesting, when and if they do, in actions that we might reasonably call fascist. I'm defining fascism in this narrow scenario as actionable intolerance of others based on a specific type of paranoia, one that seeks to absolve the paranoiac by conversely blaming one or more other groups based on the identification of that individual's own determination. In other words, I'm saying that the person in question may decide that the reason he is acting with such hatred and violent inclinations is that he is experiencing what is to him a reasonable terror of The Other, in some cases an identification based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever it may be.
I am also arguing that every person on this planet has that kernel of confusion inside him.
I will not ask you to agree with that last statement. I will instead tell you about a couple of my own terrors. I will speak of a few bits of fertilizer that have nurtured the dreaded fascist within me. A more difficult disclosure I have never undertaken.
I was twenty or twenty-one. Ruth Ann and I were waiting in her car parked outside a 7-Eleven in a ghetto part of town. It was dark out. About a dozen African-American young adults were milling around in the parking lot. They were just walking around in no particular manner and without evident purpose. But they were also making it impossible for Ruth Ann to back out of our parking space without running into some of them. The car's back-up lights were on. Our windows were rolled up. We saw that maybe four of five of these young men were snickering while looking in our direction. No one made to get out of our way.
I'm still fascinated by this thing all these years later. The guys in that parking lot lived nearby, I assume. After all, convenience stores cater to local traffic and there were no other cars in the lot, so they must have been from around those parts, those particular parts being, as I said, poverty-stricken in the extreme. In their day to day lives, these men wielded very little power. Yet that very moment on that very dark night, they controlled that parking lot. They controlled the two of us sitting in that car in that parking lot.
It was bad enough to get my own ass kicked. Add to that my much stronger fear that Ruth Ann might get hurt as well and you get some sense as to the pressure. Now let's add some more. I figured that Ruth Ann would kind of expect me to deal with this situation myself so that no harm would come to her. I wasn't very big, but I was "the guy" and what the hell good was I if I couldn't fight off a dozen street thugs? Then again, there was always the worry that I might overreact and bring down upon us the fury of a gang, if that's what they were, when simple frightened patience might be all that was required. If this sounds exaggerated and over-complex, well, we were college students at the time.
We could have rolled down a window and politely asked the fellows to allow us to exit the majesty of this glorious old parking lot. I could have stepped out of the car and shouted, "Hey! Tryin' to back up here! What the fuck, man?" I could have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk and come out swinging. Or we could have just hit the gas and hoped that most of them got out of our way.
Since that night, I have asked myself many times if I would have felt differently had those dozen young men been white. The answer--and I hate this--is yes, absolutely. And that, my friends, is one of those kernels of fascism inside me. You see, the question itself is loaded. If those guys had been white, what does that mean? Hell, the members of the Manson Family were white. The rolls of the KKK are teeming over with white guys. The German-American Bund was white as sunshine. But the question takes for granted that the white guys in the hypothetical would be a group of white-shirt-wearing, black tie-dangling, bicycle pumping Mormon missionaries, or something of that ilk, rather than, say, a band of drunken pool hall rejects ready to relive the days of the Vikings. So even my own liberal-guilt question has a trace of the Reich about it.
(Not to leave you all in undue suspense, cooler heads prevailed and we simply waited the group out. I think it lasted five minutes. When we got out of there, we talked about how easily fear translates into that one great big ugly word.)
Here's the other personal story, along with another instance of latent fascism. I was walking through the same exact neighborhood on my way to somewhere else. When I got even with the most dilapidated block, I felt an arm snake itself around my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, skinny black man, probably about my own age, stinking of booze. He smiled at me as one silver tooth shimmered. He said, "I needs money fo whiskey. An don't even think 'bout sayin no."
Because a year had come and gone, I had grown just a wee bit more sophisticated in dealing with things that scared me. On pure instinct alone, I replied, "Man, I was just on my way to get a drink myself. I'd love some company. Come on."
Well, bite my mother if that guy didn't saddle up next to me and escort me to my favorite neighborhood bar just across the tracks in the "better" section of town. We walked in together and I even bought him a beer, which was all this bar served. When he drained that glass and demanded another, I said, "Nope. That's all I'm buying."
There was nothing he could do. We were on my turf now.There wasn't another black face in that barroom and it wouldn't have mattered anyway because this was more about economics than race. He just shrugged and left.
For the longest time I felt pretty clever about what I'd done. It took me a long time to realize what an asshole I'd been. You see, I could have just refused, or lied, or given him a dollar. But I'd been scared, which you may notice is one common denominator here. I even rationalized that I'd taught the guy a lesson. What a dope.
Where does this horrible shit come from? I mean, hey, I was part of the generation that was expected to be somehow beyond color, aloof from fear and hatred, enlightened and free. Yet there I was, a stinking sophomoric coward, plain and simple.
A few years later I went driving through that very same neighborhood with my friend Donnie. He looked out the car window at the run down conditions and at the men hanging out in front of abandoned stores. He said, "We're gonna have to do something about this one day."
"What are you talking about?"
"Those people. They're taking over. If we don't stop them soon, it'll be the end of us."
I never had another conversation with Donnie because I decided I didn't want to hang out with a racist son of a bitch.
And yet, if I'd been fair, I would have recognized some of my own earlier emotions in what my friend had said. He was just voicing his own fear. Where Donnie came from, African-Americans were the minority, to the extent that they existed at all. Don could have gone his entire life, had he chosen to do so, without ever once interacting with a person of color. So when he saw those men sleeping outside the stores, or guzzling booze from a paper bag, or just walking from one place to another, he got scared. After all, there were a bunch of them and only two of us.
Them. Us. What a pair of stupid words.
I could tell you how I believe I have become a better person since those college days. Hey, it might even be accurate. But I also know that poison never really leaves the system, once it's introduced. It;s like a virus that keeps mutating away from the cure, becoming more and more resilient. More and more frightening. More and more psychotic.
This is where the excellent Pressure Point comes in. I could talk for a while about how no one other than Stanley Kramer could have so successfully produced this movie or how I wish that director Hubert Cornfield had made more movies or how this is the single greatest performance in the life of Sidney Poitier as the conservative psychiatrist in a prison where he has been handed the unenviable task of treating a Nazi bastard played to perfection by singer Bobby Darin. What I need to talk about instead is the assumption this movie makes, which comes out again and again, that fascism is mental illness.
This particular entry, untitled as I write it--will take longer, I suspect.
In my heart, I believe that Philmer is not the forum for self-analysis. First of all, that type of thing is all too often precious. Secondly, I'd rather write about movies, or music, or even the ghastly specter of politics. Yes, I am aware that I have on several occasions lured you, Tonstant Weader, into dipping your big toe into the unsettled pond of my life via many a heartfelt story of destitution, delirium or delight. I have, however, always been most studious in pulling back so that I wasn't required to crack open the nut to find out what was inside. That would have been unpleasant. That would also have made for much more interesting reading. For that deliberate omission, I apologize, at least this once.
All the same, I still plan to have as much of my own way as possible. I will use the occasion of my viewing of the spectacular Pressure Point (1962) as the jumping off point for a bit of the old self-psychoanalysis. I realize that could end up being the most self-indulgent bore in the history of the world. Yet somehow I suspect you will not drift off. I'm sure of it. We all know one another by now.
Without going into the specifics of it just yet, I will tell you that Pressure Point makes the dramatic argument that fascism is a form of serious mental illness. As ideas go, that's one big head full of snakes. Imagine, if you will, that all those goosestepping neanderthals who fell under the charm of Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels were actually just a bunch of psychologically diseased middle class stooges with that once in a lifetime opportunity to act out their antisocial compulsions within a system where to do otherwise would, paradoxically, be antisocial. Think about it. You take your typical German merchant class Aryan, circa 1935. He's been projecting his own insecurities onto the concept of enterprise and nationhood for as long as he can remember. Then his country and his enterprise gets the shit kicked out of them by a war. He is left with two broad options. He can conclude that his entire personal philosophy, which guided his behavior, has always been ridiculous, or he can blame someone else, some grandiose group of conspirators, for wrecking his dreams. As Nietzsche wrote, "My memory says I did that. My pride says I cannot have done that. Eventually, memory yields."
This is essentially the argument made by the movie Pressure Point, the fascinating film to which we will eventually get around to discussing in some detail. Before we do, however, this subject requires a bit of digging.
One of the ideas that has rolled around in my own mind for years now is that mental illness, like mental health, is actually a spot on a continuum, a spot that often re-positions itself based on circumstance. When external stress is minimal, the individual will typically suffer less psychiatric symptoms. But introduce heavy stress--whether real or imagined--into his life, and the individual will find his needle sliding steadily into the danger zone of psychosis. What I am suggesting is that each person, through a likely blend of socio-biological factors, has a given predisposition to aberrant thoughts, most often manifesting, when and if they do, in actions that we might reasonably call fascist. I'm defining fascism in this narrow scenario as actionable intolerance of others based on a specific type of paranoia, one that seeks to absolve the paranoiac by conversely blaming one or more other groups based on the identification of that individual's own determination. In other words, I'm saying that the person in question may decide that the reason he is acting with such hatred and violent inclinations is that he is experiencing what is to him a reasonable terror of The Other, in some cases an identification based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever it may be.
I am also arguing that every person on this planet has that kernel of confusion inside him.
I will not ask you to agree with that last statement. I will instead tell you about a couple of my own terrors. I will speak of a few bits of fertilizer that have nurtured the dreaded fascist within me. A more difficult disclosure I have never undertaken.
I was twenty or twenty-one. Ruth Ann and I were waiting in her car parked outside a 7-Eleven in a ghetto part of town. It was dark out. About a dozen African-American young adults were milling around in the parking lot. They were just walking around in no particular manner and without evident purpose. But they were also making it impossible for Ruth Ann to back out of our parking space without running into some of them. The car's back-up lights were on. Our windows were rolled up. We saw that maybe four of five of these young men were snickering while looking in our direction. No one made to get out of our way.
I'm still fascinated by this thing all these years later. The guys in that parking lot lived nearby, I assume. After all, convenience stores cater to local traffic and there were no other cars in the lot, so they must have been from around those parts, those particular parts being, as I said, poverty-stricken in the extreme. In their day to day lives, these men wielded very little power. Yet that very moment on that very dark night, they controlled that parking lot. They controlled the two of us sitting in that car in that parking lot.
It was bad enough to get my own ass kicked. Add to that my much stronger fear that Ruth Ann might get hurt as well and you get some sense as to the pressure. Now let's add some more. I figured that Ruth Ann would kind of expect me to deal with this situation myself so that no harm would come to her. I wasn't very big, but I was "the guy" and what the hell good was I if I couldn't fight off a dozen street thugs? Then again, there was always the worry that I might overreact and bring down upon us the fury of a gang, if that's what they were, when simple frightened patience might be all that was required. If this sounds exaggerated and over-complex, well, we were college students at the time.
We could have rolled down a window and politely asked the fellows to allow us to exit the majesty of this glorious old parking lot. I could have stepped out of the car and shouted, "Hey! Tryin' to back up here! What the fuck, man?" I could have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk and come out swinging. Or we could have just hit the gas and hoped that most of them got out of our way.
Since that night, I have asked myself many times if I would have felt differently had those dozen young men been white. The answer--and I hate this--is yes, absolutely. And that, my friends, is one of those kernels of fascism inside me. You see, the question itself is loaded. If those guys had been white, what does that mean? Hell, the members of the Manson Family were white. The rolls of the KKK are teeming over with white guys. The German-American Bund was white as sunshine. But the question takes for granted that the white guys in the hypothetical would be a group of white-shirt-wearing, black tie-dangling, bicycle pumping Mormon missionaries, or something of that ilk, rather than, say, a band of drunken pool hall rejects ready to relive the days of the Vikings. So even my own liberal-guilt question has a trace of the Reich about it.
(Not to leave you all in undue suspense, cooler heads prevailed and we simply waited the group out. I think it lasted five minutes. When we got out of there, we talked about how easily fear translates into that one great big ugly word.)
Here's the other personal story, along with another instance of latent fascism. I was walking through the same exact neighborhood on my way to somewhere else. When I got even with the most dilapidated block, I felt an arm snake itself around my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, skinny black man, probably about my own age, stinking of booze. He smiled at me as one silver tooth shimmered. He said, "I needs money fo whiskey. An don't even think 'bout sayin no."
Because a year had come and gone, I had grown just a wee bit more sophisticated in dealing with things that scared me. On pure instinct alone, I replied, "Man, I was just on my way to get a drink myself. I'd love some company. Come on."
Well, bite my mother if that guy didn't saddle up next to me and escort me to my favorite neighborhood bar just across the tracks in the "better" section of town. We walked in together and I even bought him a beer, which was all this bar served. When he drained that glass and demanded another, I said, "Nope. That's all I'm buying."
There was nothing he could do. We were on my turf now.There wasn't another black face in that barroom and it wouldn't have mattered anyway because this was more about economics than race. He just shrugged and left.
For the longest time I felt pretty clever about what I'd done. It took me a long time to realize what an asshole I'd been. You see, I could have just refused, or lied, or given him a dollar. But I'd been scared, which you may notice is one common denominator here. I even rationalized that I'd taught the guy a lesson. What a dope.
Where does this horrible shit come from? I mean, hey, I was part of the generation that was expected to be somehow beyond color, aloof from fear and hatred, enlightened and free. Yet there I was, a stinking sophomoric coward, plain and simple.
A few years later I went driving through that very same neighborhood with my friend Donnie. He looked out the car window at the run down conditions and at the men hanging out in front of abandoned stores. He said, "We're gonna have to do something about this one day."
"What are you talking about?"
"Those people. They're taking over. If we don't stop them soon, it'll be the end of us."
I never had another conversation with Donnie because I decided I didn't want to hang out with a racist son of a bitch.
And yet, if I'd been fair, I would have recognized some of my own earlier emotions in what my friend had said. He was just voicing his own fear. Where Donnie came from, African-Americans were the minority, to the extent that they existed at all. Don could have gone his entire life, had he chosen to do so, without ever once interacting with a person of color. So when he saw those men sleeping outside the stores, or guzzling booze from a paper bag, or just walking from one place to another, he got scared. After all, there were a bunch of them and only two of us.
Them. Us. What a pair of stupid words.
I could tell you how I believe I have become a better person since those college days. Hey, it might even be accurate. But I also know that poison never really leaves the system, once it's introduced. It;s like a virus that keeps mutating away from the cure, becoming more and more resilient. More and more frightening. More and more psychotic.
This is where the excellent Pressure Point comes in. I could talk for a while about how no one other than Stanley Kramer could have so successfully produced this movie or how I wish that director Hubert Cornfield had made more movies or how this is the single greatest performance in the life of Sidney Poitier as the conservative psychiatrist in a prison where he has been handed the unenviable task of treating a Nazi bastard played to perfection by singer Bobby Darin. What I need to talk about instead is the assumption this movie makes, which comes out again and again, that fascism is mental illness.
In this film, liberalism is its own perfect foil. The administrators are like the desk cops in a Dirty Harry film and Poitier sounds like Clint Eastwood, which is one hell of a turnabout.
Again, the assumption is that Darin is nuts because he is still a Nazi. In other words, no matter what the DSM-IV says, fascism itself is a sign that a person is predisposed to harm himself or others, whether consciously or otherwise. As such, it is something that must always be guarded against. And we cannot protect ourselves from it if we fail to recognize the symptoms.
You know the symptoms, right? Fear, terror, paranoia, anger, hatred, all cloaked within a cloud of "common sense."
Whew.
I appreciate your patience with my vituperation. Self-analysis that's worth anything is always painful. I'm drained. I've been writing this for three solid hours and possibly one gaseous half-hour. I am done.
Again, the assumption is that Darin is nuts because he is still a Nazi. In other words, no matter what the DSM-IV says, fascism itself is a sign that a person is predisposed to harm himself or others, whether consciously or otherwise. As such, it is something that must always be guarded against. And we cannot protect ourselves from it if we fail to recognize the symptoms.
You know the symptoms, right? Fear, terror, paranoia, anger, hatred, all cloaked within a cloud of "common sense."
Whew.
I appreciate your patience with my vituperation. Self-analysis that's worth anything is always painful. I'm drained. I've been writing this for three solid hours and possibly one gaseous half-hour. I am done.
The Cycle Savages
On the first day of classes back at Film Critic University (Eau Claire, class of 1982), the headmistress taught us with the crack of a whip that the one thing we must nevah evah do is to sum up a creative person's life in a pithy line or two. Oh, it would be easy, Tina assured us. Remarkably, disgustingly easy. "There's just one problem," she said. "We critics nevah evah do nothin' nice and easy." She sneered and bit the snapping end of her weapon across the quivering blackboard. She was emphatic, in her own way. She said, "The critic is always subordinate to even the grossest pile of celluloid dung. Unless--" Again she cracked her whip and this time the blackboard shattered in anticipation. "Unless we're talking about Mike Curb." The pieces of broken slate muted as they struck the floor. "Mike Curb is the exception, boys. Don't you nevah evah say nothin' nice about Curb."
What can I say? The tuition was cheap.
Mike Curb. What a guy. He's still around, matter of fact. First I heard of him was back in 1970 when he was head of MGM Records, which had recently merged with Verve. A self-described cultural conservative, Curb threw eighteen of the label's acts to the curb--bad pun intended--because he claimed they encouraged drug usage among their impressionable audiences, like that was some kind of headline. Now at that time, though only twelve, I was quite partial to groups that encouraged drug usage, so I determined to keep my ears and eyes open about this here white Curb boy.
As it turned out, my juvenile instincts were right on. Mike Curb was a big proponent of such presumably wholesome groups as The Osmonds, Sammy Davis Jr., Shawn Cassidy, and his own Mike Curb Congregation. He was also a hep cat with the goons of the Nixon Administration and even went on to be the Republican Lieutenant Governor of California under Jerry Brown, an odd combination of leadership indeed.
But the damnedest thing that Curb ever did (and those of you wondering when I was ever gonna get around to making the point, well, it may be about to happen, you never know, so listen up, just in case) was to make the music for a number of early biker flicks, including the truly excellent Born Losers, which was the first of the four Billy Jack films, as well as Riot on Sunset Strip and The Wild Angels.
Nowadays Curb sponsors NASCAR racers and manages the companies that control the works of various contemporary Christian and Country musicians, most of them rather boring sorts.
Somewhere along the line, around about the end of the Sixties, Curb hooked up with future American Top Forty so-called disc jockey Casey Kasem, the voice of numerous cartoon characters (notably Shaggy from "Scooby Doo"), and the two of them enlisted a writer-director named Bill Brame to make an extremely antagonistic biker film called The Cycle Savages (1969), which starred a young and energetic actor named Bruce Dern. While this was Brame's first directorial assignment, Dern was already something of a rising movie veteran, having been featured invariably as the bad guy in westerns and other biker bonanzas. (Years later I watched Dern in an interview talking about the stars of his generation. He said something to the effect that "When people like Jack Nicholson and myself were starting out, we knew that we wouldn't be the pretty-boy Robert Redford types or the Paul Newman types. But we knew we would make it--because we were interesting.") Dern really works his ass off in The Cycle Savages. His incredible freedom and intense spontaneity saves this movie from the slag heap. The same cannot be said for the contribution of Mr. Curb.
I guess Curb and Kasem wanted to make a film that would have some mass-alarm appeal, the kind of movie made by and for straights who wouldn't know a Honda from a Harley or a GTO from a Gremlin.
Aside from Dern's vivacious performance, three things stand out in this film. First, we get to see part of a naked Melody Patterson, she of "F-Troop" fame, although she is badly cast in this film as a reformed not quite prostitute. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable here that the glory of revealed mystery is unfortunately lost. Second, the editing in this movie is so bad that it could have been sown together by Elvira Mistress of the Dark on a night when she couldn't find the corkscrew. Third, and more to the point, the music really sucks bananas. That music, of course, was courtesy of Mike Curb, without his Congregation, one presumes. You know how in movies from this period somebody is always turning on a radio and what comes out is that tinny-sounding instrumental crap that old folks thought young folks were crazy about, even though any self-respecting hipster of the period would have smashed any radio deigning to blare such garbage? Yeah? Well, that was Curb's entire soundtrack. Yet in a twisted way, that horrible music went right well with the editing, even in the first scene, where the biker gang, known as Hell's Chosen Few, come roaring into some curb side (sorry) eatery and terrorize everyone. Whoever was in charge of tracking this scene just put all kinds of weird grumbling and smushing sounds on a short endless loop, not to torture us but to save money.
And that ain't the half of it. During this opening montage of rowdy biker behavior of the sort that would embarrass the Sons of Anarchy, we spy a sketch artist sitting at a nearby tableau, etching out his impressions of the destruction in process. Now, two things about this really rile up Dern, who plays Keeg, the leader of the gang. One, he's afraid that if these drawings make their way into the hands of the police, well, the whole gig will be up. I never knew that police trusted pencil sketches in the same way they do digital photography, as far as vital evidence is concerned. Apparently I'm stupid. Two, the drawings aren't especially good. That last fact didn't really seem to bother anyone in the movie, but it very much worked its way into my crawl. "He's a freaking hack!" I screamed at the screen. "Tell him! Let him know to go back to school!" But, no. That would make too much sense. Instead Dern decides the artist can't be trusted and plans to destroy the man's hands.
To the extent that there was any intent whatsoever for this movie to do anything other than to turn a fast buck for Curb and Kasem, that intent most certainly was to use a wide brush to smear young folks. In the biker club house, we see psychedelic drawings of John Lennon. We see inverted peace symbols. We see women being brutalized, even though there's a strongly misogynistic implication that those women bring it on themselves. Elsewhere we see a brutalized bartender bemoaning the drug-crazed youth market. In short, most of the things that the straights thought the Sixties were "about" gets lumped into one big sack and tossed off as corrupt.
Okay. That's cool. That's just what Curb set out to do and he accomplished his goal. Never mind that the only thing that kept audiences from laughing through their vomit was the magnificence of Bruce Dern, although even with him there was one bit of oddness that never really got explained. His diction, his erudition, his every spoken word was crisp, clear, and without any of those typical dropped ending "g's" that some associate with everyday speech. Half the time he sounds like John Houseman on acid. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe Dern had worked too hard to learn how to do movie talk to risk his efforts deteriorating in this slop bucket of a film.
So, yes, Tina, my dear ancient instructor that never was. I have not chopped Curb down in a pithy line or two. I used the better part of an evening to get it across. Where's your whip now?
What can I say? The tuition was cheap.
Mike Curb. What a guy. He's still around, matter of fact. First I heard of him was back in 1970 when he was head of MGM Records, which had recently merged with Verve. A self-described cultural conservative, Curb threw eighteen of the label's acts to the curb--bad pun intended--because he claimed they encouraged drug usage among their impressionable audiences, like that was some kind of headline. Now at that time, though only twelve, I was quite partial to groups that encouraged drug usage, so I determined to keep my ears and eyes open about this here white Curb boy.
As it turned out, my juvenile instincts were right on. Mike Curb was a big proponent of such presumably wholesome groups as The Osmonds, Sammy Davis Jr., Shawn Cassidy, and his own Mike Curb Congregation. He was also a hep cat with the goons of the Nixon Administration and even went on to be the Republican Lieutenant Governor of California under Jerry Brown, an odd combination of leadership indeed.
But the damnedest thing that Curb ever did (and those of you wondering when I was ever gonna get around to making the point, well, it may be about to happen, you never know, so listen up, just in case) was to make the music for a number of early biker flicks, including the truly excellent Born Losers, which was the first of the four Billy Jack films, as well as Riot on Sunset Strip and The Wild Angels.
Nowadays Curb sponsors NASCAR racers and manages the companies that control the works of various contemporary Christian and Country musicians, most of them rather boring sorts.
Somewhere along the line, around about the end of the Sixties, Curb hooked up with future American Top Forty so-called disc jockey Casey Kasem, the voice of numerous cartoon characters (notably Shaggy from "Scooby Doo"), and the two of them enlisted a writer-director named Bill Brame to make an extremely antagonistic biker film called The Cycle Savages (1969), which starred a young and energetic actor named Bruce Dern. While this was Brame's first directorial assignment, Dern was already something of a rising movie veteran, having been featured invariably as the bad guy in westerns and other biker bonanzas. (Years later I watched Dern in an interview talking about the stars of his generation. He said something to the effect that "When people like Jack Nicholson and myself were starting out, we knew that we wouldn't be the pretty-boy Robert Redford types or the Paul Newman types. But we knew we would make it--because we were interesting.") Dern really works his ass off in The Cycle Savages. His incredible freedom and intense spontaneity saves this movie from the slag heap. The same cannot be said for the contribution of Mr. Curb.
I guess Curb and Kasem wanted to make a film that would have some mass-alarm appeal, the kind of movie made by and for straights who wouldn't know a Honda from a Harley or a GTO from a Gremlin.
Aside from Dern's vivacious performance, three things stand out in this film. First, we get to see part of a naked Melody Patterson, she of "F-Troop" fame, although she is badly cast in this film as a reformed not quite prostitute. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable here that the glory of revealed mystery is unfortunately lost. Second, the editing in this movie is so bad that it could have been sown together by Elvira Mistress of the Dark on a night when she couldn't find the corkscrew. Third, and more to the point, the music really sucks bananas. That music, of course, was courtesy of Mike Curb, without his Congregation, one presumes. You know how in movies from this period somebody is always turning on a radio and what comes out is that tinny-sounding instrumental crap that old folks thought young folks were crazy about, even though any self-respecting hipster of the period would have smashed any radio deigning to blare such garbage? Yeah? Well, that was Curb's entire soundtrack. Yet in a twisted way, that horrible music went right well with the editing, even in the first scene, where the biker gang, known as Hell's Chosen Few, come roaring into some curb side (sorry) eatery and terrorize everyone. Whoever was in charge of tracking this scene just put all kinds of weird grumbling and smushing sounds on a short endless loop, not to torture us but to save money.
And that ain't the half of it. During this opening montage of rowdy biker behavior of the sort that would embarrass the Sons of Anarchy, we spy a sketch artist sitting at a nearby tableau, etching out his impressions of the destruction in process. Now, two things about this really rile up Dern, who plays Keeg, the leader of the gang. One, he's afraid that if these drawings make their way into the hands of the police, well, the whole gig will be up. I never knew that police trusted pencil sketches in the same way they do digital photography, as far as vital evidence is concerned. Apparently I'm stupid. Two, the drawings aren't especially good. That last fact didn't really seem to bother anyone in the movie, but it very much worked its way into my crawl. "He's a freaking hack!" I screamed at the screen. "Tell him! Let him know to go back to school!" But, no. That would make too much sense. Instead Dern decides the artist can't be trusted and plans to destroy the man's hands.
To the extent that there was any intent whatsoever for this movie to do anything other than to turn a fast buck for Curb and Kasem, that intent most certainly was to use a wide brush to smear young folks. In the biker club house, we see psychedelic drawings of John Lennon. We see inverted peace symbols. We see women being brutalized, even though there's a strongly misogynistic implication that those women bring it on themselves. Elsewhere we see a brutalized bartender bemoaning the drug-crazed youth market. In short, most of the things that the straights thought the Sixties were "about" gets lumped into one big sack and tossed off as corrupt.
Okay. That's cool. That's just what Curb set out to do and he accomplished his goal. Never mind that the only thing that kept audiences from laughing through their vomit was the magnificence of Bruce Dern, although even with him there was one bit of oddness that never really got explained. His diction, his erudition, his every spoken word was crisp, clear, and without any of those typical dropped ending "g's" that some associate with everyday speech. Half the time he sounds like John Houseman on acid. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe Dern had worked too hard to learn how to do movie talk to risk his efforts deteriorating in this slop bucket of a film.
So, yes, Tina, my dear ancient instructor that never was. I have not chopped Curb down in a pithy line or two. I used the better part of an evening to get it across. Where's your whip now?
Hurry Sundown
With America waving its flag of diversity, you might think that the anger of hatred and bigotry was no longer riding shotgun down the highways and back roads of this mighty country. Heck, we elected and re-elected a man named Barack Obama. We put Halle Berry on the cover of In Style. We even co-opted hip hop culture into Wall Street. So what's the problem?
The problem, in case you've been distracted by survival, is that the lion and the lamb still cannot quite lie down together without the lamb needing to sleep with one eye open. I may spend far too much time in front of this computer, but I talk to more people than most folks do each and every day and brother and sister I am here to tell you that this last election has really pissed off some potentially very unpleasant people. There's a lady in Pennsylvania who called to inform me that they are taking over. A friend from Mormon country let me know in no uncertain terms that people up his way are scared about the results of the vote count. I received what I trust will be the final phone call from a jerk in Florida who screamed for fifteen minutes that we were all going to be down on our knees worshiping false gods any day now. And I must have received twenty tweets on election night informing me that "my guy" was a terrorist who had intimidated "his people" into voting for him.
My guy was a woman named Jill Stein. She lost. Satisfied?
I would just like to say that what scares me is the possibility that this kind of race hate is still with us, just like it was when I was a kid in small town Ohio. Schoolyard bully Bill O'Reilly told his minions that the establishment is no longer white men, the implication being that like-minded people had better get their sheets and torches. All of this pressure puts those of us who disagree with the leader of the free world in the position of defending a president whose policies, in many cases, appear to be quite similar to those of his predecessors, white males all, lest some fool mistake our opposition as putting us in the same line as the bigots and reactionaries. I'm beginning to feel as if that might be perfectly acceptable for the simple reason that I would rather be on the side of peace-love-and-understanding and risk being wrong than find myself on the same side as Bill O'Reilly about anything.
I'm not saying that the occasionally knee-jerk endorsement of the Obama administration isn't almost as foolish as the same type of acceptance of the Ted Nugent ravings, Gordon Liddy phlegm and Rush Limbaugh snot drippings. After all, wasn't it Sly Stone who cautioned us that there's different strokes for different folks?
Well, Sly was wrong--as he himself soon discovered.
Social media makes race hate feel almost acceptable in a sly and insular way. While researching this article, I came upon a site that featured "The 15 Most Racist Tweets of Election Night." The texts were all the same vile swill I used to hear on the playground when I was a kid, the same stomping ground where cretins like O'Reilly used to spit on the kids wearing dungarees.
Until recently, most of this cretinism steered clear of popular films. That was until something called 2016: Obama's America puked up on these shores back in August of this year. I'd be a little surprised if you haven't at least heard of this grog because to date it is the fourth highest grossing "documentary" film in U.S. history. The movie was put together by Dinesh D'Souza, a former Reagan neophyte and scrotum scratcher, an Indian (as in east Indian) American, and the former president of King's College. D'Souza tries to draw parallels between himself and the 44th president, concluding that Obama's dad was the source of the man's communist sympathies, an inference that would make me smile if it weren't so full of maggots and insanity.
To wash the feel of this bile off my skin, I decided to sit back and watch Hurry Sundown (1967), a movie that is very different from the anti-Obama movie. Hurry Sundown was produced and directed by Otto Preminger, the man famous for (among other things) Laura. I have to tell you, my expectations were pretty frail because I'd read half a dozen old reviews that essentially said the movie was a floating turd that no one had gotten around to flushing. That's what makes life interesting. You get to wonder why otherwise intelligent people might greet a great movie with such open derision. At last the answer slapped me across the back of the head. Those critics actually took the film at face value, neglecting to see the characters themselves as symbols of something else. You see, much of the criticism of this movie rested on the suggestion that the characters were rather one-dimensional. I'm not necessarily willing to grant that point because it ignores the changes that come over Jane Fonda and even Michael Caine. But, okay, you can temporarily have that issue on your side of the argument. I still maintain this is a uniquely brilliant film, maybe even a masterpiece, specifically because the characters lack a certain depth.
But let's look at the cast. The white folks in the movie are led by the aforementioned Fonda and Caine, who play Julie Ann and Henry Warren, the former the great-grand-daughter of a slave owner, the latter the heel who married into her family for the lust of wealth. John Phillip Law and Faye Dunaway play Rad and Lou McDowell, he a returning World War II veteran, she his wife and mother of their four children. The McDowell family live across the way from the black folks, with whom we will soon become friendly. Up the road aways we have Burgess Meredith as the rancorous and hateful Judge Purcell, the man in whose court the first fake denouement will occur. And praise God, we even get Luke Askew (about whom it was my pleasure to write a few weeks ago in the review of Rolling Thunder) as the leader of a Klan-like Georgia contingent. Oh, and we can't forget George Kennedy who, as you may have guessed, plays the miscegenating yet racist sheriff.
The black folks are led by the pairing of Robert Hooks as Reeves Scott and Diahann Carroll as Vivian Thurlow. Reeves owns the property across the way from the McDowells. Vivian knew Reeves before the war. Now she's back from New York, having snagged a plumb job as a teacher. Her dad's a local professor. Vivian thinks Reeves' mom must be in her seventies and is surprised to learn she's only fifty-four. It's been a hard life. Years earlier she was Julie Ann's mammy.
Circumstances created by Caine and Fonda bring Law and Hooks together. Caine plays one evil son of a bitch; in fact, his character, Henry, is right up there with Cathy Aimes from East of Eden as one of the most despicable characters in all fiction. As was said of Cathy, Henry has a malformed soul. Julie Ann starts out as the prototypical rich liberal, telling the judge he's an idiot for spitting in the communion cup just because a black woman drank from it before it was passed to him. We can tell, though, that Julie's platitudes won't hold and that turns out to be exactly right. She can't wait to have her snake husband convince her to evict her former mammy from the house to which the old woman holds deed and title.
I'm not going to give away any more of the plot because the plot is as much a symbol as the characters themselves. The white people--most of them, anyway (the young reverend seems like a decent dude and Jim Backus as the attorney is a hoot and hero)--here are sick. Simple as that. The black people are noble and naive. Simple as that. Okay, so was Preminger a dolt? Hardly. What he put together, as I have said, is a symbolic movie where the images tells the story more than the dialog or plot development. Caine drips liquid contempt for everyone, even his own autistic son. To him everyone is a sucker waiting to be plucked. Askew is the right wing white trash malcontent who doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he gets his kicks. Kennedy tries to be likable, but shows his hand as he remarks that "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice."
The reason this movie will work for some people is the same reason it won't for others. Some people have been on the receiving end of violent force from things that looked large. Just because there's no Richard Pryor-style character laughing with his friends about the treacheries of whitey, that doesn't make this film any less convincing. That hard fist of establishment justice carries a heavy weight. If you've felt that weight smack you around, you'll understand this movie almost immediately. But if all you've ever done is read about it, you probably will think ofHurry Sundown as superficial. Hey, different strokes. Wait. I think we disabused that notion earlier.
When I replay the vituperative hatred I've been hearing for almost a week now regarding the big election, I feel a genuine embarrassment. If that's just liberal guilt, well, fine, I can live with that accusation. I think it's a lot more than that, though. When I hear those hateful words about the president--words that have nothing to do with any public policy and only to do with the man as a person--I die just a bit inside. No one wants to be mistaken for an imbecile. Do they?
The problem, in case you've been distracted by survival, is that the lion and the lamb still cannot quite lie down together without the lamb needing to sleep with one eye open. I may spend far too much time in front of this computer, but I talk to more people than most folks do each and every day and brother and sister I am here to tell you that this last election has really pissed off some potentially very unpleasant people. There's a lady in Pennsylvania who called to inform me that they are taking over. A friend from Mormon country let me know in no uncertain terms that people up his way are scared about the results of the vote count. I received what I trust will be the final phone call from a jerk in Florida who screamed for fifteen minutes that we were all going to be down on our knees worshiping false gods any day now. And I must have received twenty tweets on election night informing me that "my guy" was a terrorist who had intimidated "his people" into voting for him.
My guy was a woman named Jill Stein. She lost. Satisfied?
I would just like to say that what scares me is the possibility that this kind of race hate is still with us, just like it was when I was a kid in small town Ohio. Schoolyard bully Bill O'Reilly told his minions that the establishment is no longer white men, the implication being that like-minded people had better get their sheets and torches. All of this pressure puts those of us who disagree with the leader of the free world in the position of defending a president whose policies, in many cases, appear to be quite similar to those of his predecessors, white males all, lest some fool mistake our opposition as putting us in the same line as the bigots and reactionaries. I'm beginning to feel as if that might be perfectly acceptable for the simple reason that I would rather be on the side of peace-love-and-understanding and risk being wrong than find myself on the same side as Bill O'Reilly about anything.
I'm not saying that the occasionally knee-jerk endorsement of the Obama administration isn't almost as foolish as the same type of acceptance of the Ted Nugent ravings, Gordon Liddy phlegm and Rush Limbaugh snot drippings. After all, wasn't it Sly Stone who cautioned us that there's different strokes for different folks?
Well, Sly was wrong--as he himself soon discovered.
Social media makes race hate feel almost acceptable in a sly and insular way. While researching this article, I came upon a site that featured "The 15 Most Racist Tweets of Election Night." The texts were all the same vile swill I used to hear on the playground when I was a kid, the same stomping ground where cretins like O'Reilly used to spit on the kids wearing dungarees.
Until recently, most of this cretinism steered clear of popular films. That was until something called 2016: Obama's America puked up on these shores back in August of this year. I'd be a little surprised if you haven't at least heard of this grog because to date it is the fourth highest grossing "documentary" film in U.S. history. The movie was put together by Dinesh D'Souza, a former Reagan neophyte and scrotum scratcher, an Indian (as in east Indian) American, and the former president of King's College. D'Souza tries to draw parallels between himself and the 44th president, concluding that Obama's dad was the source of the man's communist sympathies, an inference that would make me smile if it weren't so full of maggots and insanity.
To wash the feel of this bile off my skin, I decided to sit back and watch Hurry Sundown (1967), a movie that is very different from the anti-Obama movie. Hurry Sundown was produced and directed by Otto Preminger, the man famous for (among other things) Laura. I have to tell you, my expectations were pretty frail because I'd read half a dozen old reviews that essentially said the movie was a floating turd that no one had gotten around to flushing. That's what makes life interesting. You get to wonder why otherwise intelligent people might greet a great movie with such open derision. At last the answer slapped me across the back of the head. Those critics actually took the film at face value, neglecting to see the characters themselves as symbols of something else. You see, much of the criticism of this movie rested on the suggestion that the characters were rather one-dimensional. I'm not necessarily willing to grant that point because it ignores the changes that come over Jane Fonda and even Michael Caine. But, okay, you can temporarily have that issue on your side of the argument. I still maintain this is a uniquely brilliant film, maybe even a masterpiece, specifically because the characters lack a certain depth.
But let's look at the cast. The white folks in the movie are led by the aforementioned Fonda and Caine, who play Julie Ann and Henry Warren, the former the great-grand-daughter of a slave owner, the latter the heel who married into her family for the lust of wealth. John Phillip Law and Faye Dunaway play Rad and Lou McDowell, he a returning World War II veteran, she his wife and mother of their four children. The McDowell family live across the way from the black folks, with whom we will soon become friendly. Up the road aways we have Burgess Meredith as the rancorous and hateful Judge Purcell, the man in whose court the first fake denouement will occur. And praise God, we even get Luke Askew (about whom it was my pleasure to write a few weeks ago in the review of Rolling Thunder) as the leader of a Klan-like Georgia contingent. Oh, and we can't forget George Kennedy who, as you may have guessed, plays the miscegenating yet racist sheriff.
The black folks are led by the pairing of Robert Hooks as Reeves Scott and Diahann Carroll as Vivian Thurlow. Reeves owns the property across the way from the McDowells. Vivian knew Reeves before the war. Now she's back from New York, having snagged a plumb job as a teacher. Her dad's a local professor. Vivian thinks Reeves' mom must be in her seventies and is surprised to learn she's only fifty-four. It's been a hard life. Years earlier she was Julie Ann's mammy.
Circumstances created by Caine and Fonda bring Law and Hooks together. Caine plays one evil son of a bitch; in fact, his character, Henry, is right up there with Cathy Aimes from East of Eden as one of the most despicable characters in all fiction. As was said of Cathy, Henry has a malformed soul. Julie Ann starts out as the prototypical rich liberal, telling the judge he's an idiot for spitting in the communion cup just because a black woman drank from it before it was passed to him. We can tell, though, that Julie's platitudes won't hold and that turns out to be exactly right. She can't wait to have her snake husband convince her to evict her former mammy from the house to which the old woman holds deed and title.
I'm not going to give away any more of the plot because the plot is as much a symbol as the characters themselves. The white people--most of them, anyway (the young reverend seems like a decent dude and Jim Backus as the attorney is a hoot and hero)--here are sick. Simple as that. The black people are noble and naive. Simple as that. Okay, so was Preminger a dolt? Hardly. What he put together, as I have said, is a symbolic movie where the images tells the story more than the dialog or plot development. Caine drips liquid contempt for everyone, even his own autistic son. To him everyone is a sucker waiting to be plucked. Askew is the right wing white trash malcontent who doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he gets his kicks. Kennedy tries to be likable, but shows his hand as he remarks that "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice."
The reason this movie will work for some people is the same reason it won't for others. Some people have been on the receiving end of violent force from things that looked large. Just because there's no Richard Pryor-style character laughing with his friends about the treacheries of whitey, that doesn't make this film any less convincing. That hard fist of establishment justice carries a heavy weight. If you've felt that weight smack you around, you'll understand this movie almost immediately. But if all you've ever done is read about it, you probably will think ofHurry Sundown as superficial. Hey, different strokes. Wait. I think we disabused that notion earlier.
When I replay the vituperative hatred I've been hearing for almost a week now regarding the big election, I feel a genuine embarrassment. If that's just liberal guilt, well, fine, I can live with that accusation. I think it's a lot more than that, though. When I hear those hateful words about the president--words that have nothing to do with any public policy and only to do with the man as a person--I die just a bit inside. No one wants to be mistaken for an imbecile. Do they?
The Intruder
You may not know the name, but Charles Beaumont made this world a better place. He was one hell of a writer, among the best, especially if speculative fiction is your cup. I'm sure you know who I'm talking about. He was this old guy from Chicago, except he wasn't really old. Matter of fact, he was dead by his thirty-eighth birthday. But Lord the hell that man raised. Rod Serling liked him. That's why Rod let him write scripts for "Twilight Zone," far out stuff like "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You." This was originally titled "The Beautiful People."
I know, "Twilight Zone" come off kind of preachy these days, what with audiences being so damned sophisticated. But that's alright. Because this here Beaumont was a damned righteous fellow who could take even a premise like, well, getting beautiful, and take it to its wildest extremes.
The cat specialized in what you'd call short stories and in his days, especially the 1950s and 1960s, that was where you found some of the hottest writing: Bradbury, Ellison, Richard Mattheson, and the others.
Just like those guys, Beaumont wanted to be a star. Well, writers don't get to be stars, but they sure enough can do try. He wrote an amazing short called "The Crooked Man," a story so far ahead of its time that the world still hasn't quite caught up, even though in was published in 1955. Imagine the guts it took him to write--hell, to even think up--a story about a future world where heterosexuality carries with it the stigma that homosexuality used to bear. Straight guy ends up in a gay bar, meets a woman he likes, she likes him too, and they get caught playing hide the snake in one of the back rooms. Whoa! Crime against nature! Damn! The story was published in Playboy, which was a gutsy move for that mag, something they'd not even consider doing these days.
But that was Beaumont. If he wasn't taking people's prejudices and shoving them in their faces, well, he just wasn't happy. (Not that being happy came easily to the man. He had a rare form of spinal meningitis that apparently sped up his aging process so that he looked one hundred on the day he died.) Take for instance tonight's super duper movie, The Intruder (1962), or Shame, or The Stranger. It went by all those names depending on where you were when you watched it. The movie starred William Shatner. He played a very nasty guy named Adam Cramer. Adam had got it in his head that the thing to do was to go to a small southern town and stir up the white folks against the black folks on account of the recent laws that said school integration was the thing to do. Watching this you can see that Shatner's talents were wasted playing a good guy because he used that same smarmy charm he later had as Captain Kirk and turned it against his enemies in The Intruder.
This movie was brash and naive--two words you always hear when this movie comes up, but in this case we can proceed as if brash and naive were good things because the truth is that they can be very good and as a matter of fact I for one think it's high time we all stopped acting as if being super sophisticated was some sort of badge of honor when in reality it's the super sophisticates who always miss out on what's actually going on around them (and if you don't believe me, just ask the Shangri-Las, whose hit, "Sophisticated Boom Boom" set the record straight, as it were.) Shatner comes to town and seduces the teenaged daughter of the liberal who runs the local newspaper. Then he plies his loins onto the nymphomaniac manic depressive wife of his friend down the hall. But Shatner isn't just in town to get his pencil sharpened. Naw. He's in town to unearth the latent racism of the passive aggressive white folks who want to just sit back and let integration sweep the land. None of the townspeople have any particular reason to hate black people. But it's the south, so that's just what they do. Shatner tells them that their will is divine and they must not let miscegenation penetrate the pudenda of the local cheerleader squad. "Lawd, do ya think it'll geet that uglah?" "Oh, my yes, Mrs. Perkins. In some areas, it already has."
The cat specialized in what you'd call short stories and in his days, especially the 1950s and 1960s, that was where you found some of the hottest writing: Bradbury, Ellison, Richard Mattheson, and the others.
Just like those guys, Beaumont wanted to be a star. Well, writers don't get to be stars, but they sure enough can do try. He wrote an amazing short called "The Crooked Man," a story so far ahead of its time that the world still hasn't quite caught up, even though in was published in 1955. Imagine the guts it took him to write--hell, to even think up--a story about a future world where heterosexuality carries with it the stigma that homosexuality used to bear. Straight guy ends up in a gay bar, meets a woman he likes, she likes him too, and they get caught playing hide the snake in one of the back rooms. Whoa! Crime against nature! Damn! The story was published in Playboy, which was a gutsy move for that mag, something they'd not even consider doing these days.
But that was Beaumont. If he wasn't taking people's prejudices and shoving them in their faces, well, he just wasn't happy. (Not that being happy came easily to the man. He had a rare form of spinal meningitis that apparently sped up his aging process so that he looked one hundred on the day he died.) Take for instance tonight's super duper movie, The Intruder (1962), or Shame, or The Stranger. It went by all those names depending on where you were when you watched it. The movie starred William Shatner. He played a very nasty guy named Adam Cramer. Adam had got it in his head that the thing to do was to go to a small southern town and stir up the white folks against the black folks on account of the recent laws that said school integration was the thing to do. Watching this you can see that Shatner's talents were wasted playing a good guy because he used that same smarmy charm he later had as Captain Kirk and turned it against his enemies in The Intruder.
This movie was brash and naive--two words you always hear when this movie comes up, but in this case we can proceed as if brash and naive were good things because the truth is that they can be very good and as a matter of fact I for one think it's high time we all stopped acting as if being super sophisticated was some sort of badge of honor when in reality it's the super sophisticates who always miss out on what's actually going on around them (and if you don't believe me, just ask the Shangri-Las, whose hit, "Sophisticated Boom Boom" set the record straight, as it were.) Shatner comes to town and seduces the teenaged daughter of the liberal who runs the local newspaper. Then he plies his loins onto the nymphomaniac manic depressive wife of his friend down the hall. But Shatner isn't just in town to get his pencil sharpened. Naw. He's in town to unearth the latent racism of the passive aggressive white folks who want to just sit back and let integration sweep the land. None of the townspeople have any particular reason to hate black people. But it's the south, so that's just what they do. Shatner tells them that their will is divine and they must not let miscegenation penetrate the pudenda of the local cheerleader squad. "Lawd, do ya think it'll geet that uglah?" "Oh, my yes, Mrs. Perkins. In some areas, it already has."
Adam Cramer has tapped into a power, the power of a salesman who has an ample market for the bile he wants to unload. But the husband of the woman he bops above is a far better salesman and he knows right away that Cramer has got a tiger by the tale and can't possibly control it. The characters in this story are like that: far more complex than we've been conditioned to expect in this world of car chases and crooked cops.
If you have the time and inclination, you can watch this amazing movie on Netflix. I think it's even free on YouTube, although you should probably say thanks to Beaumont if you opt the free route. You can certainly make it up to his progeny by checking out any of his marvelous collections, such as The Howling Man, Hunger and Other Stories, and Night Ride and Other Journeys. The Intruder is still the best adaptation of his work, but the rest of it comes close most of the time and you really do owe it to yourself to see just how much courage it must have taken the first young black students as they crossed over onto previous lily white terrain. Going through those school doors had to have been scarier than anything dreamed up by George Romero or even Roger Corman. Did I mention that Corman was the director of this movie?
If you have the time and inclination, you can watch this amazing movie on Netflix. I think it's even free on YouTube, although you should probably say thanks to Beaumont if you opt the free route. You can certainly make it up to his progeny by checking out any of his marvelous collections, such as The Howling Man, Hunger and Other Stories, and Night Ride and Other Journeys. The Intruder is still the best adaptation of his work, but the rest of it comes close most of the time and you really do owe it to yourself to see just how much courage it must have taken the first young black students as they crossed over onto previous lily white terrain. Going through those school doors had to have been scarier than anything dreamed up by George Romero or even Roger Corman. Did I mention that Corman was the director of this movie?
Rosemary's Baby
The American poet Robert Frost wrote "I never dared to be radical when I was young for fear it would make me conservative when I was old."
That sentiment holds true for the finest horror movies. The most frightening movie of all time, of course, is the original Tobe Hooper-directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Probably the most "beautiful," if that's the word, is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. But the best of all--best in the sense that it's both terrifying and leaves us weak with its inevitability--is Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). We can debate all night about the different conceptions of value in a film. I think values, the plural, is far more instructive. And the values of the finest horror movies tend to be staunchly conservative, at least in the social sense of that term. You can take a piece of propagandistic, misogynist dreck like The Exorcist and put it in your pipe. There's a big difference between conservative and reactionary. Rosemary's Baby fits in the glorious tradition of suggesting that all these newfangled DEE-vices like yer danged colored TEE-vee and pills fer all yer ills are among the sources of our societal decay. If Guy Woodhouse hadn't wanted to make it big in Hollywood and leave his Nebraska roots, then none of this devil-worshiping nonsense would've ever fallen upon him and his poor bride Rosemary wouldn't have spawned the son of Satan.
Right.
The only problem with that theory is that Rosemary is the perfect conservative wife of 1968. She had no ambitions outside the home. Her husband took her away from all her young pot smoking friends and locked her up with a very old crowd where she could immerse herself in all kinds of stimulating activities like playing Scrabble and drinking Tannis Root (which did not exist outside Ira Levin's novel and/or Polanski's screenplay, so don't waste your time trying to find it in your neighborhood wicken store). Indeed, it is only when she rejects the machinations of her husband and his odd friends that we feel she has any chance at all of getting out of this pickle. (One of the curious things about life imitating art occurred during the filming when new husband Frank Sinatra told new wife Mia Farrow--Rosemary--that she needed to wrap up her work in this movie PDQ or else the marriage was over. She completed the film according to the director's schedule rather than that of her husband. Frank filed for divorce).
There is something else about this move that I think bears mentioning. I mean, hey, I could tell you that Roman Polanski created an intro aerial shot that is so fantastic that you hardly even consider just how impossible it must have been, or how he purposely gave away the plot so the audience would be forced to obsess on how Rosemary might get out of the mess rather than worry about surprising us, the way Levin did in his novel. I could even tell you the trivia that the apartment building where the film takes place is the Dakota, where John Lennon was living when he was murdered, or that the Time magazine cover story really did exist, or that there were all sorts of clues in the movie that happen so fast they're easy to miss, such as when at the New Year's Eve party someone shouts out that this is Year One without explanation, or that Anton LaVey played the role of the devil. But what I'd rather share with you is this:
When we watch the early scene where Rosemary and Guy (John Cassavetes) meet Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer), someone mentions that the Pope is coming to America and Roman goes off on a bit of a tangent about the ridiculousness of all the supposed theatrical elements of the Pope's appearance. He scoffs with an intellectual flair at the pomp and circumstance of the Pope's arrival. The reason I find this exchange interesting is because there is a difference between people who have, let's say, an intellectual or even moral struggle accepting the existence of God and, on the other hand, people who simply hate religion on specific principle and God in general. The Roman Castevet character is clearly of the latter persuasion and I think his character bears close watching in the movie not only because Blackmer is so very very good with the role but because the type of man Castevet is unfortunately feels all too common. Hold on tight, kiddies, the radical fire-breather is about to say something a tad conservative. You may want to mark this date in your diaries. Okay: I have no use whatsoever for people who make a big deal out of rejecting religion altogether. I wrote a piece several months back about how annoyed I get with the unthinking absolutism of certain atheists and I was met with a vituperation of responses culminating in one young man who expressed his feelings in two words, the first a vulgar euphemism for fornication and the second the name God itself. His use of language did not scare me. What scared me was the sense of abandon with which he threw away his brain.
Look. I'm agnostic. I have been since I was around seventeen. Who cares? What matters is that in my case the term means that I feel the existence of many things, including that of a God or Gods, is something that is not knowable in the way that we understand epistemology today. In my case it is also a political position because I suspect that anything that allows me to look forward to a future existence of happiness will discourage me from struggling for justice while I'm alive. What bugs me greatly is people for whom any faith necessarily equates with a form of stupidity. The connection between belief in the abstract and ignorance may or may not exist. But I see no evidence that one causes the other. Osama bin Ladin was a fundamentalist. Timothy McVeigh was a fundamentalist. The Muslim religion should not be rejected on the basis of the practices of one very nasty man any more than the Christian religion should be rejected because of the behavior of another. If the manners and practices of an adherent are to be the measure of the value of a given belief system, then there's not a religion I've heard of that can stand up on its own legs.
The funny thing is that these intelligent folks who ridicule all matters of faith know that it is intellectually inconsistent to judge a philosophy by the actions of the supplicants. But they do it anyway. They point to a professional loser such as Terry Jones who decided it would be great fun to burn the Koran and they say "Whoa, hey! That's what religion will do for you!"And they do it anyway because they aren't actually all that interested in the truth of a given situation. They're simply interested in spreading a bit more nastiness in the world. Religion can be so damned inconvenient. I mean, heck, if more people went to church or stayed home and watched it on TV or spent time doing something besides buying a bunch of crap for which they have no Godly purpose, what oh what would ever happen to our scared economy? Right.
Now if you want to tell me, for instance, that the Bible is full of all sorts of contradictions, I will tell you that you are correct. The first four of the five books known as the Gospels of the New Testament themselves all tell considerably different versions of the life and death and aftermath of Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul was something of a woman hater. The Revelation of St John the Divine reads like an acid trip. And the Old Testament may be full of grand drama, but it does have its share of inconsistencies as well, not the least of which being how many of each animal Noah took onto the Ark. So if you like you may treat it as fiction and have a good laugh. But the hard thing to admit is that there is some considerably good advice in the book. That was something I first thought about when I read the words of Jubal in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and it holds true, I think. Don't commit murder sounds reasonable enough. Don't bear false witness is good advice. But for super human platitudes, you cannot top one from the New Testament, where Christ is crucified and he knows he can wipe out the Romans with the blink of an eye--within the context of the story--and instead of that he talks to God and says, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
You do not have to be religious or spiritual or cosmic to be blown away by that statement. In fact, it's the perfect social scientific humanist admonition. Free will enthusiast or deterministic--it doesn't matter. The meaning is that systems rather than people are the problem. Smug cynicism au currant notwithstanding, the idea that love really does conquer all may or may not be true, but what the hell is wrong with believing it?
So Rosemary's Baby is a great movie. It's right up there with Cul de Sac and Chinatown in the Polanski pantheon. It is also an extremely moral movie, no matter what the whack jobs on either end of the politico-religious spectrum tell you. It is that rarest of things that suggests with amazing subtlety that many of us make compromises that end up being sacrifices of the very things we claimed to love: our spouses, our children, our own futures.
It'll also scare you silly.
That sentiment holds true for the finest horror movies. The most frightening movie of all time, of course, is the original Tobe Hooper-directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Probably the most "beautiful," if that's the word, is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. But the best of all--best in the sense that it's both terrifying and leaves us weak with its inevitability--is Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). We can debate all night about the different conceptions of value in a film. I think values, the plural, is far more instructive. And the values of the finest horror movies tend to be staunchly conservative, at least in the social sense of that term. You can take a piece of propagandistic, misogynist dreck like The Exorcist and put it in your pipe. There's a big difference between conservative and reactionary. Rosemary's Baby fits in the glorious tradition of suggesting that all these newfangled DEE-vices like yer danged colored TEE-vee and pills fer all yer ills are among the sources of our societal decay. If Guy Woodhouse hadn't wanted to make it big in Hollywood and leave his Nebraska roots, then none of this devil-worshiping nonsense would've ever fallen upon him and his poor bride Rosemary wouldn't have spawned the son of Satan.
Right.
The only problem with that theory is that Rosemary is the perfect conservative wife of 1968. She had no ambitions outside the home. Her husband took her away from all her young pot smoking friends and locked her up with a very old crowd where she could immerse herself in all kinds of stimulating activities like playing Scrabble and drinking Tannis Root (which did not exist outside Ira Levin's novel and/or Polanski's screenplay, so don't waste your time trying to find it in your neighborhood wicken store). Indeed, it is only when she rejects the machinations of her husband and his odd friends that we feel she has any chance at all of getting out of this pickle. (One of the curious things about life imitating art occurred during the filming when new husband Frank Sinatra told new wife Mia Farrow--Rosemary--that she needed to wrap up her work in this movie PDQ or else the marriage was over. She completed the film according to the director's schedule rather than that of her husband. Frank filed for divorce).
There is something else about this move that I think bears mentioning. I mean, hey, I could tell you that Roman Polanski created an intro aerial shot that is so fantastic that you hardly even consider just how impossible it must have been, or how he purposely gave away the plot so the audience would be forced to obsess on how Rosemary might get out of the mess rather than worry about surprising us, the way Levin did in his novel. I could even tell you the trivia that the apartment building where the film takes place is the Dakota, where John Lennon was living when he was murdered, or that the Time magazine cover story really did exist, or that there were all sorts of clues in the movie that happen so fast they're easy to miss, such as when at the New Year's Eve party someone shouts out that this is Year One without explanation, or that Anton LaVey played the role of the devil. But what I'd rather share with you is this:
When we watch the early scene where Rosemary and Guy (John Cassavetes) meet Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer), someone mentions that the Pope is coming to America and Roman goes off on a bit of a tangent about the ridiculousness of all the supposed theatrical elements of the Pope's appearance. He scoffs with an intellectual flair at the pomp and circumstance of the Pope's arrival. The reason I find this exchange interesting is because there is a difference between people who have, let's say, an intellectual or even moral struggle accepting the existence of God and, on the other hand, people who simply hate religion on specific principle and God in general. The Roman Castevet character is clearly of the latter persuasion and I think his character bears close watching in the movie not only because Blackmer is so very very good with the role but because the type of man Castevet is unfortunately feels all too common. Hold on tight, kiddies, the radical fire-breather is about to say something a tad conservative. You may want to mark this date in your diaries. Okay: I have no use whatsoever for people who make a big deal out of rejecting religion altogether. I wrote a piece several months back about how annoyed I get with the unthinking absolutism of certain atheists and I was met with a vituperation of responses culminating in one young man who expressed his feelings in two words, the first a vulgar euphemism for fornication and the second the name God itself. His use of language did not scare me. What scared me was the sense of abandon with which he threw away his brain.
Look. I'm agnostic. I have been since I was around seventeen. Who cares? What matters is that in my case the term means that I feel the existence of many things, including that of a God or Gods, is something that is not knowable in the way that we understand epistemology today. In my case it is also a political position because I suspect that anything that allows me to look forward to a future existence of happiness will discourage me from struggling for justice while I'm alive. What bugs me greatly is people for whom any faith necessarily equates with a form of stupidity. The connection between belief in the abstract and ignorance may or may not exist. But I see no evidence that one causes the other. Osama bin Ladin was a fundamentalist. Timothy McVeigh was a fundamentalist. The Muslim religion should not be rejected on the basis of the practices of one very nasty man any more than the Christian religion should be rejected because of the behavior of another. If the manners and practices of an adherent are to be the measure of the value of a given belief system, then there's not a religion I've heard of that can stand up on its own legs.
The funny thing is that these intelligent folks who ridicule all matters of faith know that it is intellectually inconsistent to judge a philosophy by the actions of the supplicants. But they do it anyway. They point to a professional loser such as Terry Jones who decided it would be great fun to burn the Koran and they say "Whoa, hey! That's what religion will do for you!"And they do it anyway because they aren't actually all that interested in the truth of a given situation. They're simply interested in spreading a bit more nastiness in the world. Religion can be so damned inconvenient. I mean, heck, if more people went to church or stayed home and watched it on TV or spent time doing something besides buying a bunch of crap for which they have no Godly purpose, what oh what would ever happen to our scared economy? Right.
Now if you want to tell me, for instance, that the Bible is full of all sorts of contradictions, I will tell you that you are correct. The first four of the five books known as the Gospels of the New Testament themselves all tell considerably different versions of the life and death and aftermath of Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul was something of a woman hater. The Revelation of St John the Divine reads like an acid trip. And the Old Testament may be full of grand drama, but it does have its share of inconsistencies as well, not the least of which being how many of each animal Noah took onto the Ark. So if you like you may treat it as fiction and have a good laugh. But the hard thing to admit is that there is some considerably good advice in the book. That was something I first thought about when I read the words of Jubal in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and it holds true, I think. Don't commit murder sounds reasonable enough. Don't bear false witness is good advice. But for super human platitudes, you cannot top one from the New Testament, where Christ is crucified and he knows he can wipe out the Romans with the blink of an eye--within the context of the story--and instead of that he talks to God and says, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
You do not have to be religious or spiritual or cosmic to be blown away by that statement. In fact, it's the perfect social scientific humanist admonition. Free will enthusiast or deterministic--it doesn't matter. The meaning is that systems rather than people are the problem. Smug cynicism au currant notwithstanding, the idea that love really does conquer all may or may not be true, but what the hell is wrong with believing it?
So Rosemary's Baby is a great movie. It's right up there with Cul de Sac and Chinatown in the Polanski pantheon. It is also an extremely moral movie, no matter what the whack jobs on either end of the politico-religious spectrum tell you. It is that rarest of things that suggests with amazing subtlety that many of us make compromises that end up being sacrifices of the very things we claimed to love: our spouses, our children, our own futures.
It'll also scare you silly.
The Dirty Dozen
I almost never watch movies on TCM. First of all, most of what they play is garbage, except during the channel's annual respite when they celebrate the Academy Awards charade and actually put on some fine movies. Over the next thirty-one days, they'll be going wild with some of the best commercial films made in America and elsewhere, such as I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Key Largo, Public Enemy, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Wait Until Dark, Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, The Wild Bunch, Papillon, Lolita, Night of the Iguana, The Rains Came, Grapes of Wrath, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Viva Zapata, Three Faces of Eve, Norma Rae, The Informer, Suspicion, Notorious, Spellbound, Mutiny on the Bounty(1935), Singin' in the Rain, North by Northwest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Blow-Up, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Stagecoach, A place in the Sun, Seven Days in May, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, The Caine Mutiny, Easy Rider, The Last Detail, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Third Man and Carnal Knowledge, among many others. These movies truly are classics and the next month promises to be a good one for fans and enthusiasts of excellent cinema.
The other reason I otherwise shy away from Turner Classic Movies is that frequent host Robert Osbourne appears to know almost nothing about the movies the channel shows. Oh, he can read well, as he did last evening when Turner Classic Movies broadcast The Dirty Dozen (1967). Gee, the movie featured a whole bunch of formerly big names in the entertainment field and golly Lee Marvin's career sure did take a spin upwards when this macho flick came out. He was so obviously reading these words--words which for all I know he believes or even may have written for himself--that I settled into a supine position across my love seat and anticipated a very long movie that I was going to hate.
I was not disappointed.
Robert Aldrich directed this World War II movie set in England in 1944. Now let's stop there for a moment. The movie was made and released in 1967, a time when not everyone in America thought that war was necessarily a grand thing to be doing. Oh, I must have forgotten that World War II, like the so-called Civil War, was one of those wars that was secretly moral and basically justified. Okay. For a moment there I felt anachronistic. The movie begins with a hanging. Some young American fellow is in a prison, gets escorted to the gallows, waits while Lee Marvin is brought in to observe, has the noose plopped over his head and around his neck, listens while the priest mumbles Latin, and drops through the trap door to his death. Hold everything. I thought 1967 was the summer of love. Beads and babes and bongs and beautiful love-stuff. How the hell could Aldrich begin his movie in such a sadistic manner? Dang it, I again forgot about the setting of the film: 1944 when we were dammit at war. Right.
Marvin plays a Major John Reisman, someone we quickly learn is a loose cannon who has had a successful military career, yet that career has been punctuated with all kinds of disrespect for authority, all in the name of getting the job done, the job in question being that of winning the damn war. Oh, hey, now I'm beginning to catch on. Lee Marvin is just a short-haired rebel in disguise! Cool. This might be fun after all.
Reisman wonders why he's been brought to this military base by his friend Major Armbruster (George Kennedy). The two men are drinking buddies, that's true. But why the heck is Reisman here to hang out with the hoi polloi of military brass? Enter Ernest Borgnine as Major General Sam Worden, one tough son of a bitch with a mission from God. Worden tells Reisman that the job is to round up twelve really rancid, disgusting convicts at the military prison, guys who've been found guilty of rape or murder, and train them to blow up a Nazi-occupied chateau in Brittany. The mission is very hush-hush. Theme music from "Mission Impossible" dances through our heads. In exchange for their cooperation, the twelve men, should they survive, will receive a well-deserved amnesty and be released from captivity. Screw up and they will be returned to prison to be hanged or serve out their sentences, whichever comes first.
So Reisman gathers up a truly despicable cadre of characters, including John Cassavetes as Franko, Jim Brown as Jefferson, Donald Sutherland as Pinkley, Charles Bronson as Wladislaw, and Telly Savalas as Maggot and with the help of Military Police Sergeant Clyde Bowren (Richard Jaeckel, who actually is the most sympathetic actor in the movie, and a much underrated performer), Reisman whips the boyos into shape. Their training is funny and occasionally dramatic. It is also clear that these guys--as with Reisman himself, or so we have been led to believe--have a bit of trouble handling authority. Oddly enough, Reisman seems to take well to orders as long as he's the one giving them. Hey, maybe this was a hint to Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford prison experiment! Or do I think too much?
Marvin and crew do a fantastic job of making us cringe and laugh and cheer. There's no disputing that. The acting here is stellar and anyone who says otherwise should take a second look. Sutherland's performance where he impersonates a general inspecting the troops is so hilarious we can almost forgive everything else in this otherwise sadistic foreplay.
The other reason I otherwise shy away from Turner Classic Movies is that frequent host Robert Osbourne appears to know almost nothing about the movies the channel shows. Oh, he can read well, as he did last evening when Turner Classic Movies broadcast The Dirty Dozen (1967). Gee, the movie featured a whole bunch of formerly big names in the entertainment field and golly Lee Marvin's career sure did take a spin upwards when this macho flick came out. He was so obviously reading these words--words which for all I know he believes or even may have written for himself--that I settled into a supine position across my love seat and anticipated a very long movie that I was going to hate.
I was not disappointed.
Robert Aldrich directed this World War II movie set in England in 1944. Now let's stop there for a moment. The movie was made and released in 1967, a time when not everyone in America thought that war was necessarily a grand thing to be doing. Oh, I must have forgotten that World War II, like the so-called Civil War, was one of those wars that was secretly moral and basically justified. Okay. For a moment there I felt anachronistic. The movie begins with a hanging. Some young American fellow is in a prison, gets escorted to the gallows, waits while Lee Marvin is brought in to observe, has the noose plopped over his head and around his neck, listens while the priest mumbles Latin, and drops through the trap door to his death. Hold everything. I thought 1967 was the summer of love. Beads and babes and bongs and beautiful love-stuff. How the hell could Aldrich begin his movie in such a sadistic manner? Dang it, I again forgot about the setting of the film: 1944 when we were dammit at war. Right.
Marvin plays a Major John Reisman, someone we quickly learn is a loose cannon who has had a successful military career, yet that career has been punctuated with all kinds of disrespect for authority, all in the name of getting the job done, the job in question being that of winning the damn war. Oh, hey, now I'm beginning to catch on. Lee Marvin is just a short-haired rebel in disguise! Cool. This might be fun after all.
Reisman wonders why he's been brought to this military base by his friend Major Armbruster (George Kennedy). The two men are drinking buddies, that's true. But why the heck is Reisman here to hang out with the hoi polloi of military brass? Enter Ernest Borgnine as Major General Sam Worden, one tough son of a bitch with a mission from God. Worden tells Reisman that the job is to round up twelve really rancid, disgusting convicts at the military prison, guys who've been found guilty of rape or murder, and train them to blow up a Nazi-occupied chateau in Brittany. The mission is very hush-hush. Theme music from "Mission Impossible" dances through our heads. In exchange for their cooperation, the twelve men, should they survive, will receive a well-deserved amnesty and be released from captivity. Screw up and they will be returned to prison to be hanged or serve out their sentences, whichever comes first.
So Reisman gathers up a truly despicable cadre of characters, including John Cassavetes as Franko, Jim Brown as Jefferson, Donald Sutherland as Pinkley, Charles Bronson as Wladislaw, and Telly Savalas as Maggot and with the help of Military Police Sergeant Clyde Bowren (Richard Jaeckel, who actually is the most sympathetic actor in the movie, and a much underrated performer), Reisman whips the boyos into shape. Their training is funny and occasionally dramatic. It is also clear that these guys--as with Reisman himself, or so we have been led to believe--have a bit of trouble handling authority. Oddly enough, Reisman seems to take well to orders as long as he's the one giving them. Hey, maybe this was a hint to Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford prison experiment! Or do I think too much?
Marvin and crew do a fantastic job of making us cringe and laugh and cheer. There's no disputing that. The acting here is stellar and anyone who says otherwise should take a second look. Sutherland's performance where he impersonates a general inspecting the troops is so hilarious we can almost forgive everything else in this otherwise sadistic foreplay.
The problem--and it's a big one--is one of historical context, and possibly of intent, although when we get into assuming a director's motives we are treading on some frighteningly thin ice. We learn soon enough that these twelve men are bad seeds, but most of them get whipped into being fairly good and loyal seeds by the arm-twisting the military offers. We also see that the regular army guys are just a bunch of glorified thugs who couldn't win a tug of war with the Girl Scouts were it not for the guts of the abounding misfits. Okay, the misfits-as-heroes-theme feels appropriate to the time, that's cool. Ah, but here's the problem: who are the misfits fighting? This movie came out thirty-two years after the end of World War II. Bad as our American history classes are, I imagine that most of the kids dragged through the American and English school systems had at least heard of the fascists. Certainly their parents had mentioned the subject. All the same, there's no visible or even implied sense of outrage that we can muster against the Nazis and that's because we never get anything in this movie about why the bloody hell we were at war with them in the first place. This movie runs more than two and a half hours. One might expect some suggestion that these cretins were planning to take over the world, kill millions of Jews, gypsies, and others, and turn the planet into one big slave labor camp. All we see is that some of the officers take their whores to the chateau for some civilized party time. So when Reisman and the boys trap the Nazis in the underground repository, lob in hand grenades and set the place on fire, the thrill, if that's what you want to call it, is all about watching some well-dressed German officers getting burned alive. And since all but one of the dirty dozen get killed in the process--Reisman makes it out alive, too, and there was never much doubt he would--our sense of "victory" is connected to nothing more Reasonable than the idea that it takes a good guy with a gun to defeat a bad guy with a gun, something the leaders of the National Rifle Association apparently believe but which the rest of us, I hope, have enough sense to reject.
As the pre-game kick-off to thirty-one days and nights of excellent programming, The Dirty Dozen does a huge disservice to all the films that follow.
It may just be a coincidence, but when I got up from the love seat immediately following this movie, I began a bout of violent coughing that resulted in me turning chalk white and nearly passing out. I have no idea why that might have happened.
As the pre-game kick-off to thirty-one days and nights of excellent programming, The Dirty Dozen does a huge disservice to all the films that follow.
It may just be a coincidence, but when I got up from the love seat immediately following this movie, I began a bout of violent coughing that resulted in me turning chalk white and nearly passing out. I have no idea why that might have happened.
Cleo From 5 to 7
Summer time has almost arrived and the living's easy. We may be a month away from the official start, but tonight's feature will ignore that because we are talking about Agnes Varda's new wave classic Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962). I hope you folks haven't grown tired of the recent emphasis on the French New Wave. One of my problems with life is a tendency to fixate my focus, as it were, and Varda's film remains worthy of obsession.
The movie begins June 21, as the sun--so we are told--passes from Gemini into Cancer, a fact that does not endear the fretting Cleo much to reality because hers is a world that only mimics such illusions as pain and grief. She is a pop singer, crooning out tunes written for her by a pianist composer and lyricist. Not even a chanteuse may avoid death, or its antecedents, and as the movie begins we learn that Cleo (Corrine Marchand) believes herself to have stomach cancer. The fortune teller's tarot cards don't quite confirm this suspicion, but they certainly fail to rule it out.
This startlingly well-framed and vibrant movie runs in the real time between five and seven, the hours when, as French legend holds, lovers come together. But Cleo hasn't interest in things as potentially tragic as real love. She hides within the safety of a sterile flat with a maid and two kittens, plus the frequent drop-in of assorted visitors, including a boyfriend who can't be bothered with drawing close, a girlfriend who works as a nude figure model for struggling sculptors, and the girlfriend's beau, a film projectionist who treats them and us to a clever short film within the film, one starring director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Anna Karina.
I began the previous paragraph with the statement that this movie is well-framed. Agnes Varda was originally a still photographer. Perhaps nothing in still photography bores a viewer as much as a well-composed image. In a moving picture, however, especially one that moves along with the click of the clock, the composition of extended shots is nothing short of unnerving. The overwhelming documentary feel of Cleo From 5 to 7 transforms the audience's center of gravity with the colliding poetry of visuals that dance along like iambic pentameter. Whether the frame holds a man's face as he proceeds to swallow live frogs or the countenances of Cleo and Antoine punctuated with the visage of an old woman waiting to board the street car they are standing upon, every twenty-fourth of a second of this movie--each frame of film--declares itself an unselfconscious portrait of Parisian mischief. Try as she might, Cleo cannot escape the impending harshness she imagines around every corner, upon every cobblestone, within each line of transient dialogue. Walking through a cafe, she drops a coin in the jukebox slot to fill the room with one of her own recordings, only to be met with a remark from a woman to a man about not being able to hear because of the "noise."
Things really happen in this movie, just as things really happen inBreathless and The 400 Blows. It is not how things happen but how what happens is told that distinguishes much of French new wave from other movements. It certainly distinguishes Varda and her work from the rest of the new wave. Despite the nearly androgynous sensibilities of Godard and Truffaut in, respectively, Masculin Feminin and Jules et Jim, they yearn for balance, whereas Agnes makes no such concession. This movie is about a woman, by a woman, and for the feminine part of both men and women. Femininity is not a glandular condition. It is a reflection of the pre-existing ideas that other people possess about a given person in a particular place and time. That reflection--and it's no coincidence that so many mirrors populate this movie--comes in large part from pop culture, the very culture that created the character Cleo purports to be. She uses and gets used in turn. What she cannot do, somehow, is hurt others, even though she remains convinced--at least until she meets Antoine--that the world exists to do her in. The doctor she meets at the film's conclusion delivers his prognosis with the detachment a biology freshman might bring to a dissected frog.
Yet Cleo still has Antoine. She has him for another hour. Then his train leaves for Algiers.
The movie begins June 21, as the sun--so we are told--passes from Gemini into Cancer, a fact that does not endear the fretting Cleo much to reality because hers is a world that only mimics such illusions as pain and grief. She is a pop singer, crooning out tunes written for her by a pianist composer and lyricist. Not even a chanteuse may avoid death, or its antecedents, and as the movie begins we learn that Cleo (Corrine Marchand) believes herself to have stomach cancer. The fortune teller's tarot cards don't quite confirm this suspicion, but they certainly fail to rule it out.
This startlingly well-framed and vibrant movie runs in the real time between five and seven, the hours when, as French legend holds, lovers come together. But Cleo hasn't interest in things as potentially tragic as real love. She hides within the safety of a sterile flat with a maid and two kittens, plus the frequent drop-in of assorted visitors, including a boyfriend who can't be bothered with drawing close, a girlfriend who works as a nude figure model for struggling sculptors, and the girlfriend's beau, a film projectionist who treats them and us to a clever short film within the film, one starring director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Anna Karina.
I began the previous paragraph with the statement that this movie is well-framed. Agnes Varda was originally a still photographer. Perhaps nothing in still photography bores a viewer as much as a well-composed image. In a moving picture, however, especially one that moves along with the click of the clock, the composition of extended shots is nothing short of unnerving. The overwhelming documentary feel of Cleo From 5 to 7 transforms the audience's center of gravity with the colliding poetry of visuals that dance along like iambic pentameter. Whether the frame holds a man's face as he proceeds to swallow live frogs or the countenances of Cleo and Antoine punctuated with the visage of an old woman waiting to board the street car they are standing upon, every twenty-fourth of a second of this movie--each frame of film--declares itself an unselfconscious portrait of Parisian mischief. Try as she might, Cleo cannot escape the impending harshness she imagines around every corner, upon every cobblestone, within each line of transient dialogue. Walking through a cafe, she drops a coin in the jukebox slot to fill the room with one of her own recordings, only to be met with a remark from a woman to a man about not being able to hear because of the "noise."
Things really happen in this movie, just as things really happen inBreathless and The 400 Blows. It is not how things happen but how what happens is told that distinguishes much of French new wave from other movements. It certainly distinguishes Varda and her work from the rest of the new wave. Despite the nearly androgynous sensibilities of Godard and Truffaut in, respectively, Masculin Feminin and Jules et Jim, they yearn for balance, whereas Agnes makes no such concession. This movie is about a woman, by a woman, and for the feminine part of both men and women. Femininity is not a glandular condition. It is a reflection of the pre-existing ideas that other people possess about a given person in a particular place and time. That reflection--and it's no coincidence that so many mirrors populate this movie--comes in large part from pop culture, the very culture that created the character Cleo purports to be. She uses and gets used in turn. What she cannot do, somehow, is hurt others, even though she remains convinced--at least until she meets Antoine--that the world exists to do her in. The doctor she meets at the film's conclusion delivers his prognosis with the detachment a biology freshman might bring to a dissected frog.
Yet Cleo still has Antoine. She has him for another hour. Then his train leaves for Algiers.