Change Your Image
jayroth6
Reviews
Strategic Air Command (1955)
"Strategic Air Command" (1955) A communist view
How many miles of celluloid have been exposed in the business of glorifying the men and planes that dropped the bombs that burned the cities? "Too many" is not a flippant answer.
Strategic Air Command (1955) is the supreme ideological example of the (for want of a better word) "USAF genre" movie. Washington's defeat in the Korean War thwarted plans to overturn socialism in the USSR and curb anti-colonial struggles via atomic intimidation, and created the stalemate between imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat we have come to call the Cold War. And in the Cold War, so far as Washington and its Madison Avenue and Hollywood drum-beaters were concerned, the newly inaugurated USAF had center stage. The gleaming technology and Triumph of the Will-flavored esprit de corps adumbrated in movies like this created the image of professional and self-sacrificing organization men. It was beside the point that the organization they ran, and still run, is an international murder machine pushing the violent rule of the world's final empire.
Strategic Air Command is no sensitive treatment of such "organization" men, the men in the "gray flannel suit." It is, instead, about the satisfaction to be found when men (and their wives) embrace the shipwreck of their lives and careers on the rocks of a necessity called National Security.
James Stewart played his finest roles in 1950s-era Hollywood movies. He played them in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. For Hitchcock he played men appalled to learn what transgressions they were capable of justifying and carrying-out. These were the films Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). For Anthony Mann he played rough and ready loners warring against their own egos and larger social necessities in Winchester 73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953).
Anthony Mann in the 1950s moved away from tyro kitchen sink crime films like T Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948) and into Freudian westerns like The Furies (1950). He finished as a director of historical epics on the scale of nineteenth century French history painting: Cimarron (1960), El Cid (1961), and most grandly The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
Strategic Air Command was manufactured by Paramount Pictures. It espouses "professional military conformity" writ very large. If anyone other than the Pentagon can be identified as the film's "auteur" it is screenwriters Beirne Lay Jr. (1909-1982) and Valentine Davies (1905-1961). Lay in particular, a former officer with the Army Air Corps during World War Two, made a career out of Air Power books and movies. He co-wrote 12 O'clock High (1948), that hymn to "maximum effort" and bureaucratic cold-bloodedness in the service of U.S. plutocracy, and then went to Hollywood to work on the script for the 1949 film of the same name. In 1952 Lay wrote the film Above and Beyond (1952), about the trials and tribulations of another friend of humanity, Colonel Paul Tibbetts. (Lay later wrote that perfect genuflection before the U.S. officer caste, The Gallant Hours (1960), a religious peroration on the career of Admiral Halsey.) In many ways Strategic Air Command is a fictional re-telling of Above and Beyond. The dramatic spine of both movies is the education of a husband and wife in their responsibilities as cogs in the great engine of national war-making. In both, the wives have the worst of it, waiting on the ground and learning to curb their tongues about secrecy and missed dinners. June Allyson seemed to only play these roles in the 1950s. In addition to Strategic Air Command, she played the valiant and saintly help-meet in The Stratton Story (1949), Executive Suite (1954), The Glen Miller Story (1954) (also starring James Stewart and written by Valentine Davies), and The McConnell Story (1955).
James Stewart plays professional baseball player and Air Force reservist "Dutch" Holland. Recalled to active duty, his resentment against the USAF for destroying his civilian career is eventually broken by the glamour of the new jet bomber he learns to fly (accompanied by Victor Young's lushly carnal and languorous musical score.) Along the way he meets SAC's supreme commander, General Hawks. Hawks is clearly a fictional avatar of Curtis Le May. Hawks is played by veteran character actor Frank Lovejoy. Lovejoy, now long forgotten, appeared in hundreds of movies, including such Cold War gems as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and Men of the Fighting Lady, a 1954 tribute to naval aviation during the Korean War.
"It all boils down to less danger of war," Hawks tells Dutch Holland. It all has to do with what we came to call deterrent and mutual-assured-destruction. Eventually the stifling moral cynicism of imperialists like General Hawks would be rejected, but until the Wall Street barons and the state that defends their rule is finally removed from power, the real SAC will thrive.
Is Strategic Air Command worth watching? A feminist scholar could certainly make a career, or at least a dissertation, out of the films of June Allyson. A post-modern cultural theorist could find full employment deconstructing the fetishized imagery of strategic bombers sweeping toward gorgeous golden sunsets. (Indeed, Stanley Kubrick has already sent it up in the opening credits of Dr Stangelove.) What can communists get out of Strategic Air Command? Well, communists all love James Stewart movies, and better Strategic Air Command than 1959's The FBI Story. Chew popcorn to avoid grinding teeth, comrades.
Public Enemies (2009)
Public Enemies: A communist view
On March 5, 1933 Franklin Roosevelt instituted a Bank Holiday to prop up trust in a faltering capitalism. On May 10, 1933 John Dillinger (1903-1934) and a few fellow knaves began their own bank holiday. By coincidence, Mann's recreation of that time is presented to viewers during the start of a new and unprecedented global depression. Truly, there are no new stories, only new depressions to tell them in.
***** Public Enemies organizes a few scenes around the conflicts between individuals in Hoover's organization. Billy Crudup plays Hoover as a supremely dismissive and epicene Mussolini-in-becoming. He acquires his sinecure by commanding newsreel cameras and such founts of propaganda sewage as Walter Winchell.
Mann has a genuine interest in cop institutions of capitalist rule, though I doubt he would define it this way. In Heat the cop was played by Al Pacino as a narcissist so obsessed with victory he rarely slept; the crook, Robert De Niro, as such a supremo of his craft he could only defeat himself. The final image of that film, with the victorious cop and dying crook holding hands to comfort one-another, perfectly sums-up a century of Hollywood crime dramas: always focus on the individuals.
***** To its producers Public Enemies must have looked like the perfect money-spinner. It would depict a great cops-and-robbers struggle; there was sex appeal and a love story (of a kind), and it explored one of the great tragic themes: a hero (in this case Dillinger) undone by his own flaws. To those who say moviegoers will not pay to see a story already filmed as drama and documentary so many times, the producers could retort that another well-known subject, the Titanic sinking, generated a veritable Fort Knox for its makers.
Public Enemies suffers (as Titanic and Heat do not) from centering its attention on real historical characters. Even when Mann changes facts and alters the chronology, he cannot overcome the stultifying fact that however dramatically he builds his scenes, viewers will always be ten steps ahead, waiting for him to catch up. The shoot-out at Little Bohemia Lodge might have surpassed the LA street shoot-out in Heat, but it cannot because viewers know Dillinger has a rendezvous with death on July 22, 1934.
The real Dillinger, like all past and future Dillingers in the real world, was a lumpen parasite lobotomized by the cash nexus. However charming the old folk songs about Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd sung by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, these crooks were cretinous individualists and reactionary to the core. They were slapped-down and executed in the streets by cops serving the institutional bandits of Wall Street as an example to others. Crime and theft are expressions of class division and conflict, but only in the most reactionary manner; Dillinger, Karpis, and their ilk aped the most die-hard and vile habits of the acquisitive bourgeoisie.
Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis is the ostensible second lead in Public Enemies. This is because the Purvis-Hoover conflict has been the subject of so much scholarship which attempts to portray Purvis as a true alternative to Hoover's organizational blueprint and personal rule. While liberals may pine, "If only Purvis had defeated Hoover," there were no ideological or organizational differences between the men, only a conflict over pelf and place.
As an actor, Christian Bale has no equal in the "stony glare" department. Michael Mann lavishes him with numerous contractually required close-ups. But who can remember anything Purvis says? Purvis is shown to be a tyro surrounded by pencil pushers who must request help and guidance from older hands. Said hands arrive seemingly out of the past, through waves of steam from a passenger train, and look like reincarnations of the Earp brothers.
The movie attempts to present Purvis as the agent who defeated Dillinger, but shows us by simple allegiance to historical fact that that role was played by an agent named Charles Winstead. Throughout the second half of the film, it is Winstead who outwits, out-fights, and finally executes Dillinger. Mann telegraphs his own respect for Winstead as against Purvis by casting the fine character actor Stephen Lang in the role. (Lang is an actor Mann has employed before, most memorably as obnoxious and ill-fated Freddy Lounds in the 1986 movie Manhunter.) Winstead is portrayed as embodying all the wit and professionalism of western lawmen, much as Tommy Lee Jones was used in The Fugutive (1993) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Lang's Winstead is given the final scene, a gem after two ours of predictability. Dramatic logic would demand the Purvis character be given the final scene, as a proper emotional resolution; but since Mann must depict actual events, Purvis is erased before the movie ends.
***** The Dillinger Public Enemies presents is certainly the most handsome movie-star Dillinger we have had. Does every generation get the Dillinger it deserves? In the 1930s, we were given the "mad dog" Bogart-style version. In the 1970s, it was the electrifying and now-forgotten Warren Oates in a pseudo-John Ford style directed by John Milius. Today we get Johnny Depp, a handsome and self-knowing Dillinger who dies pursuing the "get rich quick" dreams that still bubble-up to bewitch the desperate and outcast in class society. (And not just the desperate and outcast.) The true remedy for crime is solidarity and class consciousness.
That is not the subject of summer movies. Or any movies. For the billionaire families that own and run the United States, class consciousness and solidarity will always be Public Enemy Number One.
Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
Super-Disneyfication: they come in peace
Race to Witch Mountain (2009) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1075417/
reviewed by Jay Rothermel
Race to Witch Mountain is the latest opportunity for "tween" kids to drag their "twifty" grandparents to the multiplex Walpurgisnacht and shovel some more money into Disney's satanic furnace.
The plot: Earth must be saved by blonde Aryan alien overlord teenagers with help of kindly American he-man.
Dwayne Johnson in Race to Witch Mountain is Disney's answer to Vin Diesel or a young Harrison Ford. He is also reminiscent, in his skills and range, of Joel McCrea: a man who looks good whether as a cowboy or a playboy. He is fit, handsome, self-deprecating, and has a movie star's faultless teeth. The action and light comedy demands of Race to Witch Mountain and previously Game Plan (2007) seem to fit him better than Rundown (2003) or Walking Tall (2004), two obscenely humorless and over-determined action vehicles from earlier in his career.
Not that Race to Witch Mountain isn't "over-determined." But its set-up and the early "meet cute" moments between male and female leads (Johnson and Carla Gugino) are calmly and clearly handled in a matter of minutes.
Seems an interstellar race of very white Anglo aliens have turned their home world into a polluted dump. The most socially conscious have, in experiments conducted on earth, found a way to turn things around. Sadly, the rulers of this distant world have decided to colonize earth rather than clean up their own mess. Two alien teens are all that stands - as the saying goes - in their way.
Race to Witch Mountain is the supreme Whitley Strieber/Art Bell/UFO/secret government movie. In fact, Strieber makes a cameo appearance, just to show what a good sport he is as the last twenty years of his life are sent-up for Big Studio Hollywood derision. The movie's opening credits are a kitchen sink montage of every piece of UFO folklore in the last 60 years. Mission to Mars (2000) and Signs (2002) are sanctimonious pikers when compared to this hymn to the manias of pseudo-science.
Before James Randi and Michael Shermer have aneurisms, rest assured Race to Witch Mountain bears the same relation to John Mack/Budd Hopkins la-la land as Michael Buble does to the American Songbook: it is aesthetic mountaintop removal of the most primitive sort.
The political stance of Race of Witch Mountain is New Age Democrat: a multi-racial hero not unlike Barrack Obama (and Dwayne Johnson is the most "not unlike Barrack Obama" actor working today) clobbers the sinister Bush/McCain Patriot Act/black helicopter crowd. Additional theses: only saviors can save polluted planets; yellow cab drivers are losers; heroes drive a 1968 Mustang GT 390 Fastback and villains use fleets of black SUVs.
Said villains all look like they've just emerged from an Alex Jones version of Men in Black. Their Witch Mountain headquarters: Dick Cheney's Xanadu as imagined on Harry Shearer's radio hour Le Show.
The bubble in live-action Disney movies (High School Musical 3 (2008), Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (2009), Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009)) aimed at our pre-teenagers and used as battering rams to end resistance to the merchandise the movies spawn, shows no signs of recession. Back in the 1970s movie critics started talking about the Disneyfication of popular culture. Progress since then has been leaping forward: we now enjoy the super-Disneyfication. Or perhaps it is ultra-Disneyfication?
No matter what you call it, rest assured: they come in peace.
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Jay Rothermel lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Five Red Herrings (1975)
"Five Red Herrings" (1975)
"Five Red Herrings" (1975)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072502/
reviewed by Jay Rothermel
By the early 1940s many creative artists were pushed toward defeatism, capitulation to the bourgeoisie, and sometimes outright reaction.
The rise and triumph of fascism in Germany, the class collaborationist policies of the Stalin leadership in the USSR, and the fall of republican Spain were all prelude to September 1, 1939. In Dorothy L. Sayers this is seen in her complete abandonment of novel writing after Busman's Honeymoon (1937) and embrace of religious obscurantism. Her play cycle The Man Born to be King (1941) and the later Dante translations are today a mere pendant, ignored completely by those who know her true faith in craft and social life was best expressed in the Wimsey stores, filled with life and exalted aestheticism.
The contempt and dismissiveness leveled at Dorothy l. Sayers' novels about Lord Peter Wimsey runs like an unbroken thread through most criticism of the genre. Damned by damns and faint praise, Sayers is depicted as a woman who made a fool of herself over the detective in her novels.
"Falling in love with her hero" is a commonly used phrase, and an undeserved one. Sayers, unlike most crime novelists, developed splendid gifts as a writer in exploring Wimsey, bringing him forth as a real character and not the usual genre stereotype.
Wimsey is a hard, harsh and haunted man. Like many who came through the Great War, he could not find a proper use for the rest of his life. Over the no-mans-land of his mind, Wimsey was able to spread a thin patina of simulated humanity: interest in incunabula and detection; a passion for "butting in" and correcting the fortunes and destinies of others. He mastered the fine psychological art of silly-ass self-deprecation which harried opponents and friends alike.
All but four of the novels feature Wimsey in his bachelor days, before falling in love with accused poisoned and novelist Harriet Vane. While the Vane novels are not inferior to the others, or to the wonderful short stories collected in Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), they do suffer a certain limitation of scene compared to the open air and rude good health of Unnatural Death (1927) and The Nine Tailors (1934).
In the early 1970s the BBC made a series of adaptations of the non-Vane Wimsey novels. They starred Ian Carmichael, who had previously donned the monocle in The World of Wooster. Each production has been released on video and DVD, and the DVDs are also presented as a box set.
In TV mysteries, pacing is all. Carmichael's performance as the brittle, bracing aristocrat pushes the plot forward beyond all the patent absurdities of the mystery genre. Why would the police tolerate an amateur sleuth bulling his way through a murder investigation? Always steps ahead, Wimsey leaves neither police nor viewer time to reflect upon the question. The pleasures of language, character, and mis en scene take care of the rest.
* * *
Well-written mysteries are as enjoyable as any other well-wrought fiction. It was P.D.Q. Bach composer Peter Schickele who famously said of music: "If it sounds good, it is good."
Puzzle mysteries are said to appeal to snobbish intellectuals who want to put their reasoning to a test, much like scrabble or chess players or people who work newspaper crosswords each day. The smug certainly want to justify reading mysteries by equating them with some form of august mentation. Such comparisons usually smack of sham or guilty conscience. When Edmund Wilson wrote "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (1945) he was declaring independence from rationalizing readers who tried disguising their desire to be titillated as though it were a date with Finnegan's Wake.
* * *
Five Red Herrings takes place in and around an artists' colony in wildest Scotland, near Gatehouse and Kirkcudbright. The area is a raw St. Ives of the north, populated by various bohemian painters. Fine exterior photography lends the cold, unforgiving sky and clear waters of frigid trout streams a vivid and almost palpable life. When Wimsey dons thick gauntlets before driving in his open car, one's own hands begin to ache of cold.
Scottish painter Sandy Campbell (Ian Ireland) is the terror of the colony. A "maudlin brute," he bullies and terrorizes the men who become suspects in his murder. His explosive temper and bloody-minded contrariness have alienated fellow artists who would normally be natural allies and confidantes. He takes any comment as just cause for battle. His most obscene outrage is taking a cut-throat razor to the beard and scalp of a fellow painter (Russell Hunter) he has waylaid one night on a lonely road. Justifiable homicide never had more justification.
Most murder mysteries deal with social humiliation, vigilante retribution, and redress of balance: all pragmatic expressions of bourgeois ideology that disguise and make bearable the unpredictable violence bred by the workings of the law of value. The Wimsey stories are no different. The enjoyment resides in how the changes are rung.
The "puzzle aspect" of Five Red Herrings is Lord Peter's demolition of the murderer's alibi. It is a buoyant, open-air series of deductions, a far cry from the stereotypical "gathering of suspects" which sinks the ending of so many Golden Age of Mystery novels and their film adaptations. One of the great strengths of any Dorothy L. Sayers novel is variation of setting, and the BBC version of Five Red Herrings replicates this perfectly.
The pleasures of Sayers' Wimsey stories and novels are many. Freshly imagined and ingeniously presented characters, evocative locations, logical scene building, consistent and clever handling of point of view (one thinks of Miss Climpson's letters in Unnatural Death) are all Sayers strengths. "Simplicity itself," as the saying goes.
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I'm Alan Partridge (1997)
Up with the Partridge
Up with the Partridge
DVD review: "I'm Alan Partridge" (1997) BBC Video http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129690/ "The bitter life of a failed talk show host turned early morning local radio presenter."
"I'd personally like to understand man's inhumanity to man. And then make a program about it."
Has there ever been a portrayal of social self-humiliation as unsparing and cringe-inducing as I'm Alan Partridge? A UK TV series, it is at times unbearable to watch. When Alan stumbled over his own words and emotions while doing his best trying to chat up the beautiful front desk clerk at the Linton Travel Tavern ("equidistant between London and Norwich") one must look away. When he bulldozes through a funeral reception in a black jacket emblazoned with the Castrol logo in hopes of putting the professional squeeze on a TV executive, the sheer dread makes the flesh creep.
I'm Alan Partridge follows the arch of Partridge's career as he scrambles to organize a professional comeback. The first Alan Partridge series, Knowing Me Knowing You depicted his dire chat-variety show and ended when Partridge accidentally shot and killed a guest while on the air. The prospect of someone expending such huge amounts of money and time and energy trying to get on TV is a hilarious achievement for actor/co-creator Steve Coogan and his collaborators. At every turn, when easy pathos comes close at hand, the show steers clear with another Partridgean outrage to human feeling. Indeed, at the end of the final series episode ("Towering Alan") Partridge triumphs when he takes up a dead BBC Chief Commissioning Editor's hand to forge a signature on the contract for his professional comeback.
Alan Partridge is more than a silly-ass Bertie Wooster without Jeeves. He is lightyears beyond Basil Fawlty in being socially beyond-the-pale. He is a man gifted with the ability to always share his worst thoughts and instincts at the wrong time. He tells RTE executives from Dublin this about the Irish Potato Famine: "You'll pay the price if you're a fussy eater. If they could afford to emigrate they could afford to eat in a modest restaurant." He castigates farmers on his late night radio show for animal experiments, only to end up trapped under a Holstein carcass on the deck of a canal boat.
If Partridge is a luckless Visigoth, those around him make out even worse. His receptionist finds out she has been fired when she hears it on Alan's radio show as she rides home in a taxi from their tryst. In each episode, the harrowing martyrdom of his PA Liz is explored and given a scale something close to the sufferings of Job. Liz never seems able to catch up to Alan's latest whim or mania. She is treat as what used to be called a "pen-wipe." Michael, a maintenance worker at the Linton Travel Tavern where Alan lives, is continually upbraided by Partridge for this "Jordy" accent.
I'm Alan Partridge is a quasi Samuel Beckett comedy about a man so corkscrewed by life that he cannot have a normal or typical social instinct about his circumstances or those of other people. His daydreams are abashedly homoerotic and his Linton Travel Tavern Pay per View orders run to Bangkok Chick Boys.
Partridge sees people around him as extensions of the cash nexus, step-stools for his own egomania. Perhaps they do not appear to him as human at all. In the episode "To Kill a Mocking Alan" he meets his #1 fan Jed Maxwell. Partridge takes it as perfectly natural that his talentless TV hackwork would earn him a fan. Not until the end of the episode does he realize the fan is a stalker psychopath, and that his adoration of Partridge is simply an expression of mental illness. "You're a mentalist!" Partridge yells at Jed as he flees from the man's house in horror.
The 2 disc DVD package from BBC Video is an affectless treat. In addition to the usual deleted scenes and outtakes, there is audio commentary by Alan Partridge himself, joined by Liz. The DVD menu itself recapitulates the TV menu system from the Linton Travel Tavern: adult PPV options, elevator music, and parking lot security camera footage included.
Watch and weep.
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FTA (1972)
FTA: Now more than ever!
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/rothermel010409.html FTA -- Now More Than Ever by Jay Rothermel
FTA (Dir. Francine Parker, 1972).
Preamble: "This film was made in association with the servicewomen and men stationed on the United States bases of the Pacific Rim, together with their friends whose lands they presently occupy." Accepting his Oscar for Best Actor, Sean Penn jokingly referred to the Academy as lovers of "commies and homos." It's a tribute to the low level of politics among our cultural workers today that Sean Penn would be surprised at acknowledgement of his performance. The Academy loves movies about exceptional heroes, whether they are overcoming physical disabilities, sports team segregation, the Holocaust, or the Roman Empire.
The entertainment industrial complex also loves it when its celebrities serve as a prophylactic for US humanitarian imperialism in countries like Sudan or Tibet. (Poor Rose McGowan, conversely, hasn't been heard or seen since expressing understanding for what motivated men and women in Ireland to join the IRA.) All of which brings us to the opposite end of the movie food chain, far from the heights of Oscardom: FTA, Francine Parker's documentary about the "Free the Army" tour. Washington and Wall Street long ago erased this movie. The miracle of globalized media today, however, means we can sit at home and watch it on DVD or its showing on that greener-than-green parrot cage called the Sundance Channel.
What strikes the viewer first about FTA is the humility, sense of proportion, and optimism the film has about events it depicts. We are a long way here from the old Michael Moore bazooka and the longeurs of Ken Burns, Inc.
There are many similarities between FTA and the great rock concert documentaries of the same period: only a few lines of narration for context, and then getting out of the way of the performances.
FTA the movie was long ago blacklisted from theaters, just as FTA the traveling political musical extravaganza was blacklisted from history. A key part of the "culture war" trumpeted by media and academic hacks of the Bill Bennett-David Horowitz-Rush Limbaugh variety (and which is itself part of a larger 30 year war against the gains of the labor, civil rights, women's, and anti-war movements) is the depiction of the those opposed to the Vietnam War as "stabbing our troops in the back." One tonic effect of FTA's DVD release and Sundance showing is to put the lie to that libel. As Washington's invasion and war against the people of Vietnam proceeded, one of the greatest concentrations of anti-war sentiment and activism was found among GIs themselves. The script for the FTA revue itself was drawn exclusively from material GIs published in their own anti-war newspapers.
FTA was the product of a flourishing anti-war culture. Today we see this culture boiled down to a History Channel "flower power" documentary, histories like Tom Brokaw's Boom, and the memoirs of Senators and ex-Senators like John Kerry and Bob Kerry. But Vietnam's war of independence at its height inspired militants around the world, from Che Guevara's guerillas to the 1968 strikers in France.
One of the great pleasures of FTA is the forthright energy of the performers and their audience. The GIs heard their own thoughts -- salty, sarcastic, and full of gallows humor and solidarity at the same time -- repeated back to them. The leaps of consciousness over just a few years as they rejected each rationale of the Washington war machine confirmed the anti-war movement's strategy of orienting to these "workers in uniform." The cast of the FTA revue is filled with gifted performers. They continued with their artistic careers after the U.S. anti-war tide receded. It is a pleasure to see them in their youth, energized by work that gave shape to the feelings of the immense majority. Between concerts they marched in solidarity with local activists protesting Washington's devastating "military base colonialism" in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan.
Today one of the movie FTA's great strengths is its potential as a recruiting tool. It is the perfect length to have classes, meetings, and potlucks built around it. The moral authority of the movie is without equal: completely ignoring the pundits and the bi-partisan Wall Street war party in Washington, it lets the anti-war GIs speak for themselves.
Jay Rothermel lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Prince of Darkness (1987)
Prince of Darkness
John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) Throughout the 1980s John Carpenter was pushing forward for larger approximations of the world and the potential for collective struggle within it. He never repeated the same plot, much as the success of Halloween (1978) threw temptation across his path. Indeed, Halloween is the greatest thematic departure for him until he reached the solipsist heights of In the Mouth of Madness (1995). From Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) onward, Carpenter's great theme, echoing that of films as diverse as Potemkim and Rio Bravo, is: we have the same goal, let us put our differences aside and struggle together. If Carpenter had come along in a different historical period, when more social struggles were succeeding in the world, his films may have been more optimistic.
Prince of Darkness is a powerful film about an ensemble of scientists who think they are studying a great Something; actually, it is studying them. The research team is destroyed and we are treated in the last moments to a glimpse of something truly extraordinary.
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
The devil rides out
The Devil Rides Out (1968) The Devil Rides Out is one of the most beautiful color films from 1960s Europe. An impeccable series of images has been welded together here by assured hands with all the confidence of the builders of a new church. This is a stained-glass window made to honor the god of cinema.
Because it is also a Hammer Film Production, there is much here for the not-so-aesthetically inclined. Fast cars, a black mass, giant spiders: A Wimsey novel for the horror fan. The Dennis Wheatley novel that inspired it is a hymn to social snobbery and political reaction, but the movie throws the offal of the novel away; from the bare superstructure of plot comes an infernal pageant of crises.
Christopher Lee is very strong here, as he is in The Wicker Man; we see the often-typecast man exploring a character of wit and determination. Lee's Dracula is usually all guile and glowering insolence; here Lee's Duc DE Richleau is the lordly savior the British Empire always dreamed it could produce.
The Devil Rides Out doesn't have any points to make. This makes its point about the false consciousness bred by all religion all the more powerful.
The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
Count Zaroff
Count Zaroff by Jay Rothermel
Count Zaroff has been with us for a very long time.
He first appeared in Richard Connell's story "The Most Dangerous Game" in 1924. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack and Irving Pichel brought him to the movies in 1932, played by Leslie Banks. He was a black-hearted cad Russian aristocrat with the darkest of hearts. His life was spent on his own island, smoking long white cigarettes the way Erich Von Stroheim used to; glowering, coveting his collection of "hunting trophies," and waiting for more flies to be caught in his trap.
Said trap was the deadly series of reefs around the island. Shipwrecks sent him an unending series of house guests to
entertain. We only meet three; Rainsford, the great white hunter (Joel McCrae), Eve (Fay Wray), and Eve's alcoholic brother Martin (the great, too-long forgotten Robert Armstrong). All the other guests have had their heads mounted on the trophy room wall.
An untypical aristocrat of 1930s Hollywood (or Hollywood in any period), Count Zaroff has come to hunting humans only as a last resort. All the sportsman's other pleasures have come to bore him; he has hunted animal predators to the point to ennui. Like any artist, he has pushed ahead to the extremes of the medium. Like Damian Hirst, he rejects depiction of subject and simply mounts the subject on the wall.
But Zaroff is not one of these dilettantes for whom the struggle is everything, the goal nothing. Quite the contrary. After the hunt comes the rut, depicted in a large tapestry hung above the main staircase in the count's castle. It depicts the Satyr rampant. And Count Zaroff, when considering the beautiful Eve, seems barely in control of his own desired rampage. "After the hunt
" he tells Rainsford, eyes burning bright and lurid.
Of course, there is something wrong with the Count. This boredom with life and desire to hunt men only came to him after a head injury during a South American hunt. At his left temple, Zaroff bears the suggestively vaginal scar, a close cousin to the gash sported by Karloff's Frankenstein monster. The more excited Count Zaroff gets about the impending hunt, the more passionately he caresses the scar.
"The Most Dangerous Game" begins as an old dark house melodrama or a whodunit: travelers, house guests, ten little Indians confined to a not-so-stately home. The drunken brother, the head of house (Zaroff), and the young male and female leads (McCrae and Wray) tread around each others' emotions very gingerly but instead of sitting down to dinner, Zaroff the father figure and lord of the manor, the mature ego, decides to hunt down and murder the men, then rape the woman.
Count Zaroff, as an aristocrat, realizes there is no limit to what he is permitted; as a Russian aristocrat, he seems to have an id lapping very close to the surface. The count is turned into food for his hounds at the end of the movie, but really he does not die. We see something of his hysteria and blood-lust in Basil Rathbone's Richard III in Tower of London (1939), and Vincent Price as Edward Lionheart in Theater of Blood (1973). Without Count Zaroff, we would not have Dr. Hannibal Lecter, either. The well-bred and well-off have this is common: they loathe us, and of our sufferings make their sport.
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Jay Rothermel lives in Ohio.
Licence to Kill (1989)
The Last James Bond Movie: Licence to Kill (1985)
The Last James Bond Movie: Licence to Kill (1989)
James Bond doesn't need to show us the 'way we live now.' This isn't Le Carre or Buchan or the great Geoffrey Household. Bond's role is as a simulacrum permitting us to rationalize anxieties bred by the commodity fetish in others and ourselves. The books, and much more the movies, show us how to worship at the altar of the good life and repress all our doubts and fears, as good citizens of any empire should. Bond allows us to hunger after the life of plenty, of good taste, and use it to build a psychological carapace over our dread and alienation at the ravages of the wages system in the most socially useful way possible: we consume.
007 consumes women, sunshine, very dry martinis, fine furnishings, splendid cars. He visits the very heavens of this world: Alps, Dolomites, Aegean, Orient, Bahamas. His job, the thing that hands him upper class consumer culture on a silver platter, is simple enough. Each day he cocks a snook at his hopelessly serious boss; from time to time he deflects a steel-brimmed bowler hat or blows up a blimp.
Licence to Kill (1989) was the last Cold War-era Bond movie. But it doesn't even pay lip service to Russia, Europe, or any of Bond's old hunting grounds. This movie looks forward to the villains ordained by the first Bush regime: making war against drugs and Manuel Noriega. (The drug emperor Sanchez lives in a country called Isthmus,and runs it behind the scenes. When President Lopez confronts him about a reduced paycheck, Sanchez raises a Grinch-like eyebrow and tells him: "Remember, you're only president for life.") It also proposes a Cuban connection in the drug trade; a month after the film's release, the Cuban government executed General Arnoldo Ochoa for drug trafficking. The whole south Florida and Central American milieu of Licence to Kill is steeped in the double-dealing criminality opened by Washington's proxy counterrevolutionary war to topple the FSLN government in Nicaragua. The contra war was only the most recent imperialist pro-drug war; a previous one was called The Opium War; so may be the next one.
Sanchez, played by the find actor Robert Davi, is not a maniacal Blofeld-style super villain. He does not want to irradiate Fort Knox or provoke World War Three or sink California into the Pacific. All he wants is market expansion into the Orient; he revenges himself against the DEA, Felix Leiter, and Leiter's new bride Della so as not to lose face with prospective partners.
Licence to Kill has the usual yachts and scuba battles. But there are also characters like Professor Joe Butcher, played by the singer Wayne Newton. While he has only a few minutes of screen time, Newton turns Butcher into the acme of all seedy, hilariously crooked late-1980s televangelists. When Butcher is ripping off, or being ripped off, he says "Bless your heart" as though marveling at the glory of his own cruelness.
We might call Licence to Kill James Bond vs. Scarface. At one point in the film Sanchez tells a business partner "It's not personal, it's business." This echoes the mantra of both Scarface and The Untouchables.
Production designer Peter Lamont gives Sanchez's drug factory (hidden beneath a Mexican pyramid) a high-industrial aluminum cleanliness; it looks more like a pharmaceutical or computer plant than a common or garden drug lab.
This is the law of value at its most exotic. Sanchez hides his drugs for transport by dissolving them into the holiest of holies, gasoline. They are safely reconstituted at the other end of the pipeline provided his partners in other countries buy rights to the formula. Above all else, intellectual copyright must be upheld.
Licence to Kill wraps contemporary headlines around the bourgeois fantasy of the revenge-filled killing spree. The glee with which Bond destroys a fortune in drugs being shipped in a mini-sub, and later throws two men out of an airplane he needs for escape, capture many viewers in their emotional back flow. Revenge is a normal category of activity in our ruling class, and between individual capitalists. We become intoxicated by its much-advertised charms, too. Righteous revenge features in the plots of most thriller novels and movies, which are the dominant genre today. Many dream of "sticking it" to their "enemies" and competitors. Movies permit us to train our imaginations that way. The problems we face require not collective action in our unions and mass organizations, but a decompression chamber or a stinger missile.
This was not the last James Bond movie, but it certainly feels that way. Six years would pass before the release of Golden Eye in 1995. The measured tempo and four-square mies-en-scene of Licence to Kill are a pleasure, as are the performances. Dalton in particular achieves an almost constant agonized stillness, simply poised and waiting within his body. It is an impeccable turn by a versatile actor.
Politically, Licence to Kill is another in a long series of anti-political non-political political films. A particular capitalist enterprise makes a movie depicting some specific crimes and misdemeanors of specific capitalists, companies, countries, or industries which demonstrably must be "cleaned-up." Nothing systemic, you see. Criminal activity in the business world is abnormal, you see. Decisive individual action, not collective class action, rectifies all, you see. Thus are we safe and satisfied to remain at home, purchasing and consuming until the next sequel.
Traitor (2008)
TRAITOR: Prettying-Up a Police State
Anyone looking for a good movie about traitors can skip the new Don Cheadle vehicle Traitor. Despite all the action movie hype, it won't be around long, anyway.
Traitor is not a movie about traitors, or a sensitive post-mortem on why people might become "traitors." That old chestnut "The Man Without a Country" is Tolstoy compared with this movie.
What Traitor does give us is a hymn to the bravery and self-sacrificing heroics of stool pigeons, snitches, spooks, and the FBI. The FBI in this movie is not the FBI we all know and love; it is filled with men of daring, intelligence, and good sense. A science fiction movie couldn't be further from reality. COINTELPRO? Not in this universe!
Early on, the lead FBI agent (played by Guy Pearce) brags to his partner about growing up in the Deep South with a white minister for a father: "Every time the Klan would burn a cross on someone's lawn, he'd go out and help put out the fire." Such are the self-serving fantasies our rulers churn out. (Does anyone remember the movie Mississippi Burning? It did for the FBI what Pretty Woman did for prostitution.)
Traitor can't hold a candle to the old Cold War traitor movies. There was so much ruling class anxiety in movies like The Bamboo Prison (1954), The Rack (1955), and Time Limit (1957) that despite their reactionary line, they are still worth a look.
Martin Scorsese is our current poet laureate of traitors. Nearly all his movies are about the horror (in every sense of the word) about being a traitor. Take a look at The Departed (2006). Every lead character is a traitor to himself and something else he holds dear: a lover, a group, an organization. We're happy they all die by the end of the movie -- their suffering is over.
Being a traitor in films such a these is a close synonym to alienation in the classical Marxist sense.
Don Cheadle has a reputation for solidarity with Darfur. Darfur is a region in Africa and a word globalization activists are not afraid to wear on a t-shirt. Like the so-called genocide in Yugoslavia, it is a place only mentioned when humanitarian cover is required for the use of US military power.
In Traitor Cheadle plays a devout Muslim born in Africa and raised in Chicago. Being upset that 'extremists' and 'terrorists' are betraying the Koran, he decides to join forces with that great lesser-evil, the USA. Jeff Daniels has a few good scenes as his creep of a boss, the kind of "intelligence" genius who'd rather burn down the world with us inside than admit terrorism is blow back from decades of Washington's policies. (Cheadle is scheduled to play Toussaint Louverture in Danny Glover's upcoming film about that great revolutionary. Jeff Daniels will be playing Dave Dellinger in the 2009 Paul Greengrass release The Trial of the Chicago Seven. We have been warned.)
The fine French actor Said Taghmaoui plays lead terrorist Omar, duped by Cheadle into making him part of his plans. One of Taghmaoui's scenes shows how easy it is for an Arab to cross the US-Mexican border -- apparently they all look alike to Homeland Security.
It's hard not to feel anger or contempt at the type-casting an actor like Said Taghmaoui suffers from. His career so far reminds me of the careers of Asian-American actors back in the 1940s. A talented man like Richard Loo could play the commandant of the Japanese POW camp in The Purple Heart (1944), or Hirohito in Star-Spangled Rhythm (1942), or a chauffeur, but that was it. Taghmaoui is well-known already from Sleeper Cell and Kite Runner, and has a leading role in the upcoming UK miniseries House of Saddam. But I think it is unlikely we'll see him playing James Bond's new boss or the love interest in the next Renée Zellweger masterpiece.
Traitor's "social role" broadly speaking is to sooth and lull qualms about how Washington's rulers go about "protecting" us. Rest assured, the world of Traitor is not contaminated with orange jumpsuits or military tribunals or collateral damage. The good guys are sensitive, compassionate, and respect Islam enough to study the Koran.
Sleep well, America.