Reviews

"Nobi" or "Fires On the Plain" is a film that is so excellent on so many levels, that not enough good things can be said about it. My only regret is that I was not able to see this 1959 film sooner.

Being something of a film purist, I tend to look at films for their artistic merits based upon dialog, acting, photography and even the efforts to remain true to the period in terms of costume. Ultimately, I want to know if the film is "truthful" enough in revealing the human condition to make me think without oppressing me with what the director wants me to think.

"Fires on the Plain" is a great film because it crafts a portrait filled with realistic human reactions to the dying fires of a great historical catastrophe.

Ichikawa's film is a condemnation of war on all levels -- as any good war film should be. War is horrifying, bloody, destructive. It is also murderous on the psyche. However, what is fundamental about "Fires on the Plain" is its unapologetic look at the Japanese soldiers. It shows them slowly collapsing under the weight of superior American firepower and their nation's inability to wage a war of its own making. A fatalistic code encouraging death before surrender is at the heart of this madness.

I was astonished to see such an honest and brutally close look at the bitter fruits of Japan's military misadventure made just 14 years after the end of what the Japanese call the "Great Pacific War." Ichikawa, reveals what the Germans called the "war life," the plight of the common soldier.

Ichikawa's film is interesting, since even today Japan is having a hard time fully coming to terms with its wartime fanaticism, its subjugation of conquered peoples, the racism of its war against the Chinese and war crimes which included cannibalism by soldiers and officers practiced not only against one another, but against Allied prisoners of war.

Ichikawa produces a stark representation of the victimization of soldiers by a confluence of bad political decisions and cultural pressures.

This stark examination is skillfully done by portraying the doomed soldiers as human beings who exhibit, at various times, fear, brilliantly laconic humor, dialog enriched by its sparseness, and a plot whose complexity is belied by the grim, wilderness setting.

Ichikawa's portrait is a ragged and painful tapestry of defeated men. The tubercular Tamura, played as a woebegone and gentle soul by Eiji Funakoshi, is a good soldier who can't abandon his humanity, though he is as frightened and lost as his comrades. Before he departs for a hospital that will reject him as too healthy, Tamura is given a hand grenade by a superior who, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, advises Tamura to kill himself.

Why Tamura's hopelessly ill-supplied and militarily incapable unit was not ordered to surrender at the start of the film is telling. Ichikawa makes it plain that the war is over and everyone is merely waiting to die. As Tamura leaves his unit for his hopeless search for physical and spiritual salvation, he sees his comrades pointlessly digging an air raid shelter. They appear like corpses looking up from their own mass grave.

We later watch as the overworked hospital's medical staff abandons the dying patients to an all-consuming American artillery barrage. The pathetic patients, who crawl from their huts in a vain attempt to survive, appear like pathetic, serpentine creatures dragging themselves from an omnipotent force. You know they won't survive.

Ichikawa makes it plain that the only thing worse than a defeated army is one that has lost its honor by abandoning its humanity and its comrades. As Tamura staggers through the jungles of Leyte we encounter the noble, the dying and the exploitive. Cannibalism rears its ugly head as soldiers begin to eat one another rather than surrender to American "corned beef."

When the men do talk of surrender, the propaganda of how Americans kills prisoners is countered by a worldly-wise soldier who reveals that the approaching Americans feed and care for prisoners of war because they, unlike the Japanese, respect brave soldiers who are forced to give up.

It is the Japanese who intend to die fighting for the Emperor long after resistance has lost all meaning. Those willing to fight to the death will be killed. It is the calculus of war.

After shooting a murderous and cannibalistic comrade, whom he earlier offered his own body to as food, the fatalistic Tamura's careless surrender also seems to be an intentional form of suicide. His death is a lonely image. Was Ichikawa trying to tell us of the internal conflict of the ordinary soldier who wants to live, but who is still trapped by his nation's suicidal cultural codes?

If someone watches this film carefully, he or she will see that absolutism and fanaticism is the enemy. The Americans are portrayed as a technologically advanced people willing to employ that technology in the form of inexorable military power -- a lesson that transformed Japanese postwar society. Ichikawa's film isn't so shallow that it indicts America. Ichikawa indicts the sedimentary layers of Japan's destructive policies that created the war and then to continue it when all was lost.

Ichikawa does not mention the nuclear weapons dropped upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He doesn't have to. The slow-motion destruction of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Philippines reveals the seeds of Japan's immolation.

Documentaries are supposed to be recitations of fact, stripped of emotion and bias. Thankfully, the "Magical Life of Long Tack Sam" is a reverential and emotional examination of a fascinating man by a great-granddaughter who never knew him. This is a long-distance story of familial love; it doggedly transcends the mists of time that all too often obscure the life stories of the average man even from his own descendants.

Long Tack Sam, as he was known, should have ended up as the most obscure of the obscure -- a Chinese youth in a land riven with conflict, poverty and turmoil. But owing to his talent, drive, courage and a consuming entrepreneurial spirit, he became a world-renowned entertainer, parlaying the ancient Chinese acrobatic tradition into a magic act that toured the world.

Anne Marie Fleming reveals the history of an unusual family that, to her surprise, seems to have forgotten the great-grandfather they knew but she did not. She finds physical traces of Sam's legacy stored in museums around North America and in a cedar chest in Hawaii. One such artifact is a beautiful silk backdrop from his vaudeville days.

She also locates the spiritual remnants of her great grandfather in the memories of old magicians, vaudevillians and even a film clip paen to Sam delivered by none other than Hollywood's most famous prestidigitator, Orson Welles. With more irony than sadness, she notes that Sam is forgotten not only in Europe and America where he so frequently toured, but in China as well, noting that he incorporated so much of other cultures within his life that he perhaps became foreign to his own origins.

The family is strikingly interesting owing to its international character. Sam marries an Austrian woman and his children and grandchildren are spread throughout the world. (This during a time when Chinese were still treated poorly by most cultures and by officially repressed by immigration laws worldwide.) This cultural collision is deeply fascinating. We learn her great-uncle went to boarding school in England and Austria and is in a photograph standing behind Adolf Hitler during the Nazi leader's visit to his school. This fact would have undoubtedly disturbed the lunatic zealot of racial purity had he known it. This tradition of multiculturalism is an enduring factor in the life of this Sam's family: Director Ann Marie Fleming was born on Okinawa of Austrlian and Chinese heritage.

I never cease to be amazed at criticisms of films and documentaries by those who find a film "too long" or "boring." There is a difference between "reel" life and "real" life. Perhaps my own grandfather's accomplishments and zest for life against great odds makes me comprehend Fleming's appreciation of her forebear grandfather who understood the nature of drama and honed it to wow the public and carve out a modicum of success.

Comprehending Long Tack Sam's background, his narrow escape from a life of obscurity and poverty, his entrenched optimism, and his ability to bridge cultures while astutely producing a popular stage act, may be difficult for those addicted to special effects and the emotional manipulation of fictional contrivance. Life is more complicated, difficult and, ultimately interesting than anything Hollywood can conjure which is why documentaries can be so spellbinding.

Some who have criticized this documentary seem to believe Fleming is beating her own drum, or holding out her great-grandfather and her family as more interesting than they really are. What Fleming is doing, and we should be thankful she does so, is reminding all of us that we each have a fascinating history that should not be forgotten. This history is perhaps most important among our relatives who grew up in a time when a man had to wreck his body physically to make a living, or, in order to escape poverty, demonstrate extraordinary ability and courage to overcome stultifying physical and cultural boundaries. One cannot appreciate the Long Tack Sam's magical life unless one can grasp the circumstances of his times, which is part of Fleming's message.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a salutation to a remarkable family history driven by the accomplishments of a man who possessed courage and tenacity -- the true alchemic components of a "magical" life.

It's fascinating to note how reviews of this film -- and many others -- seem to fall along political lines.

Some who commented on this film and who liked it, happily saw a pro-UN message in Pollack's effort. (Many of these appear to be non-Americans.) American have tended to judge the film for its story-telling qualities which are sadly lacking.) Unfortunately for Pollack, his masterpiece work "Three Days of the Condor" is a terribly hard act for anyone to follow, especially for its director who is competing with himself in this genre. "The Interpreter" does not fare well in this comparison.

What was going on in this film? Sean Penn is a federal agent with an improbable and bizarre personal life (his dancer spouse is a runaway wife who dies in a car wreck with her lover...?) There there is all sorts of halting, non sequitur dialogue between Penn and Kidman that seems to hint at a romantic development but goes nowhere.

The plot turns were all contrived and some of the action was incomprehensible -- why didn't the agents get off the bus when told to? Why did they keep saying they didn't want to expose their cover until they were blown to bits? It was one of many inexplicably odd plot devices that were counterintuitive. Much of this film was so contradictory it nearly gave me a headache.

Movies are fiction, sleight of hand and fantasy but they have to be believable within their own context. "Condor" was brilliant in that it was believable within itself. Robert Redford was a thoroughly believable CIA analyst with a background that allowed him to elude assassination while developing a believable relationship with Faye Dunaway whom he kidnapped at random to aid his escape.

I'll simply fast-forward to the "The Interpreter's" outrageously unrealistic ending which I will not reveal. I'll simply ask viewers to compare it to the delicious twist at the end of "Condor" in which Redford is given fatherly advice by his own would-be assassin after the killer was instead ordered to murder the man who wanted Redford dead.

"Condor" had a hard and realistic edge to it that is missing in "Interpreter".

As for the political message of "Interpreter" regarding the UN, it seems one could see the film as arguing for and against the trouble-plagued international body. As a political message, Pollack's film seems as confused as its plot.