Reviews

In Port Wenn not a single day goes by with tribulations for one, or usually, more people. It seems unreal, but jibes with my experience of the real world. The Doctor is stoic in the best ancient traditions, and I don't know about you but this Aristophanes, and Euripides combined. I believe a tenth series will air, fortunately for this addict who found the combined pathos and irony of this 'last' episode gut wrenching. I can sleep soundly now knowing that this isn't end for the Doctor. I actually had a bad night this aired having watched the whole thing from season1, episode 1. There is still a glimmer of hope, I'm not religious in the least but I'm going to pray.

Yes it hovers between drama, soap opera, and pretty hilarious comedy, but I wouldn't monkey with it. The characters run a gamut of types, but it always adds up human, all too human. I am not ashamed to admit I'm hooked, caught up in the lives of these people, their foibles, their struggles, their zeitgeist. One roots for them, even a schmuck or two is not beyond redemption, there's something likeable, from the remove of my living room, even in the worst of them. And, after a few seasons they're as real as anyone in my life. My brother used to live in a tourist destination in California, walking distance from the ocean, and he told scads of humorous stories about the goings on there, e.g. About the seance in the banquet room of the restaurant where he worked, where the medium brought down from the Bay Area made contact with the boyfriend of one of the waitresses who was killed by a great white shark while surfing. (This is literally true). Well you get the picture.

Set in a startlingly bleak yet beautiful picaresque setting, this verismo tragedy is told with an affecting surrealism that left a lasting imprint in my mind. I saw it around Christmas/New Years week at the Unicorn Theater in La Jolla, California circa 1963 or '64. More than half a century later I rediscovered it on YouTube in a mediocre but still wonderful print, that to my utter torment has had the last 5 minutes (which included crucial images) lopped off! I pray to whatever Gods may be that a complete and high quality recording of this should be composed and released on DVD. My means are modest but I would pay $500 for any such.

All one has to do, is to read the plot synopsis given here by IMDb, to see how ridiculous this movie is. 1) The steel workers in the movie appear to be in their late twenties or early thirties (the actors were all in their thirties at least). They were too old to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Men like that didn't have to join the army (which at the time would could result in their being sent to Vietnam). They would have hung on to their jobs and gotten married. 2) If by some miraculous twist (practically impossible) of fate they wound up in the Army, they wouldn't have served together in the same outfit in Vietnam. 3) The Special Forces were an all volunteer outfit made up almost entirely of career soldiers who had to meet special qualifications to be selected. 4) Very few of our soldiers were captured by the enemy (most of the POWs were downed pilots). Bamboo (tiger) cages were a scandal notoriously used by our side (not theirs) to imprison enemy "Viet Cong" or NLF combatants or suspects (this was turned around cleverly in the movie, so Americans (the audience) can feel themselves victimized). 5) The absurdity is taken further with the Russian roulette hokum. This is utterly contrived to show the insidious brutality of the "oriental" fiends who seek to unman our red-blooded, masculine, all-American steelworker heroes. While nothing like this ever really happened, the point however is to mimic the famous scene (viewable in the documentary "Hearts and Minds") in which the Chief of Police of South Vietnam puts a pistol to the head of a prisoner with his hands tied behind his back and shoots him dead point blank, again the movie turns the imagery completely around. Lastly, the big lie in the movie is that we poor Americans have been victimized by the diabolical, insidious, inhuman orientals. Our big, strong, hulking men have been rendered temporarily impotent and defenseless against this nefarious surreal menace. In the end our boys loyalty and patriotism sees them through, though they may be physically maimed and will be emotionally scarred for live by what has transpired on this heinous foreign den of inequity. Almost nothing in the plot makes sense nor could it ever have happened save in the fertile imagination of a cunning Hollywood hack. If you like this movie, you've got some growing up to do.

An insidious crap, useful to enable future generations to analyze the diseased imagination of the society that would, in the twenty first century, destroy the whole world. I wish I could say that movie is unintentional satire, like for example "reality TV", but no. I wish I could say that perhaps, like Peckinpah, the violence in this picture is enough to turn people, even those with violent inclinations, against violence. I wish that I could say that the sadism is enough to disgust the sadistic, or that the whole thing would turn people against what it depicts. The reasons it won't are: that is is very suspenseful without much plot (or point), that it poses somber pontificating as profundity, that it depicts human struggle, and fear, and suffering as irrelevant to any theme, i.e. as moral non-sequiturs. Like today's television programs, but with special perversity, this movie takes advantage of Americans, 14% of whom are so ignorant that they can't find their own country on a map. I imagine the makers are cynics. There are different kinds of cynics. I mean the kind that laugh all the way to the bank.

Excellent movie. I recommend it to everyone. A very moving, powerfully suspenseful, substantial, insightful antidote to the poisonous view of life engendered by life in a puerile, inhumane, greedy, impetuous, ignorant, society of primates bent on destroying the world for short sighted selfish ends like a tribe of chimpanzees on a rampage, people who will sooner run you over and kill you, rather than lift their foot from the gas pedal for one second, a society that is more of a fearful mob made up of individuals acting in a concerted frenzy out of terrified fear of all the other frenzied, concerted, insane, vicious, rugged individuals that compose the madding mass of lunatics than a group of human beings rather than mere blobs of protoplasm insensible to any but the very extremes of pain and pleasure viz. twenty–first century Americans.

I'm a Viet Nam vet who spent 6½ years in the Army, 5 years as sergeant or staff sergeant. This movie is the best and most accurate portrayal of army life I've ever seen. It's accuracy and correctness is uncanny. It makes me wonder how they did it. Most audiences would not be interested in the real McCoy, but this is it. It is also a top notch war film! The bleakness, emptiness, alienation, and devastating isolation, meanness, poverty, ugliness, and frightful brutality of army life are there in spades. The wreckage both of war and of the unnatural regimentation and peculiar dual hierarchy (that of commissioned officers and of non-commissioned officers) of the military are portrayed with accuracy and near perfect verisimilitude. Steiger is 110% convincing as a seasoned, career, First Sergeant in the regular army. I didn't bother with the theme of repressed homosexuality. It's the loneliness and debilitating harshness (often self-imposed by those who opt, or more likely fall into the trap of rootless expediency, of military life) that count here. Is it any wonder that soldiers commit atrocities in war? Watch this movie and see for yourself.

This is seemingly the most exhilarating and uplifting movie I have ever seen. I go away from it strengthened and encouraged for the task or lonely road ahead. I know it would be wrong to identify with the protagonist, Johnny Clay, but I certainly sympathize with him. It may be indicative of some baseness in my character. I don't know or much care after the movie is over. His terrible downfall is, oddly, an upper rather than a downer for me. My only difficulty is rather too much exhilaration, and I need to be brought back down to earth after the curtain falls maybe by some silliness that serves to remind me of the pointless futility of human endeavor. Oddly, "The Killing" does just the opposite. Go figure. The casting and narration and direction are superb. I've read a criticism that the actress playing Johnny's girl friend is weak or miscast. I disagree. I think she's perfect for the part and lends a great verisimilitude to it as well as other qualities that are crucial to the overall effect of the story on me. I don't have a favorite movie anymore but I'd go see this one again if I were lucky enough to be able to see it in a theater, where it should be seen. The movies being made today usually ain't worth mentionin'.

A scene that intrigues me in the movie is the shot that shows the ledger being carefully filled out when supplies are being purchased in the Mexican village. The camera focuses on the ledger without explanation. I think that the significance of this brief episode is to show the rather archaic civility of the villagers who live in a small, isolated, and somewhat remote village. The lettering in the book is done with deliberate care as would all the work in the town, or village, be done in contrast with the rootless expedience of the prospectors and the still more desperate rapacity of the bandits. Most civil of all though are the Indians who come to the old prospector to ask for help. This is a very moral story, well portrayed.