Squadron Leader Adams: Well, at least the rockets won’t happen.
Air Vice Marshal Davis: Of course they’ll happen. But they won’t start tomorrow, or this month or on D-Day, and that’s important.
Squadron Leader Adams: Then what’s it all add up to? All their sacrifice?
Air Vice Marshal Davis: A successful operation.
Squadron Leader Adams: But they’re probably all dead. All 633 Squadron.
Air Vice Marshal Davis: You can’t kill a squadron.
Ending, 633 Squadron (1964)
Something for the weekend. The theme song from 633 Squadron. In my misspent youth I spent endless hours watching old war movies on TV. One of my favorites was the British flick 633 Squadron (1964) which recounted the fictional tale of a British Mosquito bomber squadron and their self sacrificial attempt to take out a well-defended Nazi V2 rocket fuel plant in occupied Norway. The film won praise for its aerial sequences, cutting edge in 1964 and George Lucas has cited the squadron’s attack on the plant as influencing the trench run sequence attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. (more…)
Back when I was a boy, I watched entirely too much television. Of course, who could blame me? Tempted by a luxuriant three, count them, three channels, albeit one of them fuzzy in bad weather, to choose from! However, I do not regret watching the Early Show on Channel 3. Back in those bygone days, many stations would run old movies from the thirties, forties and fifties, between 3:00 PM-5:00 PM. Thus I first experienced some of the classics of cinema, and one of my favorites was Double Indemnity, 1944, the first of the film noire genre. Adultery and murder were perhaps too mature topics for me in my initial pre-teen viewings, but I was fascinated by it because it seemed to be a playing out on screen of what I was learning at the time from The Baltimore Catechism: that sin will lead inevitably to destruction unless contrition and amendment are made. The film was fortunate to have at its center three masters of the craft of acting.
Fred MacMurray, born in Kankakee, Illinois, 37 miles from my abode, in 1907, was a good guy in real life and usually in reel life. A firm Catholic and staunch Republican, he tried to join the military after Pearl Harbor but a punctured ear drum kept him out of service. He adopted a total of four kids with his two wives: his first wife dying from cancer in 1953, and his second wife remaining his wife until his death. (Such fidelity was as rare in Hollywood then as it is now.) On screen MacMurray played to type and was almost always a good guy, but not always, and it is ironic that the two best performances of his career came when he played bad guys: weak, lustful and doomed Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and the scheming, cowardly Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in The Caine Mutiny.
Barbara Stanwyck had a Dickensian childhood from which she was lucky to emerge alive, her mother dying of a miscarriage and her father going off to work on the Panama Canal and never being heard from again. A series of foster homes followed, which Ruby Catherine Stevens, as Stanwyck was then named, constantly ran away from. Dropping out of school at 14 to begin working, she never looked back. Breaking into show business by becoming a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies at age 16, she was a star on broadway in the play Burlesque before she turned 20. Changing her name to Barbara Stanwyck, she broke into films immediately thereafter, displaying a flair for both drama and comedy, specializing in strong independent women. Her personal, as opposed to her professional, life was a mess. Married in 1928 to her Burlesque co-star Frank Fay, they adopted a son, Stanwyck having been rendered sterile by an abortion at 15. The marriage ended in divorce in 1935, Fay during the marriage often slapping Stanwyck around when he was drunk. Stanwyck got custody of their son. Stanwyck was a hovering and authoritarian mother, leading to a life long alienation from her son after he became an adult. Stanwyck married actor Robert Taylor in 1939, and, after numerous acts of infidelity on both sides, divorced in 1950. Ironically Stanwyck and Taylor did stay friends after their divorce, Stanwyck, who never remarried, referring to him as the true love of her life. In her politics Stanwyck was a staunch conservative Republican who supported the investigations of Congress into Communist infiltration into Hollywood. Remaining in demand as an actress almost until her death in 1990, she filled her last years with charitable work. Stanwyck was well equipped by her own tumultuous life to give depth to her portrayal of the murderous, scheming Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.
Although remembered today chiefly for his gangster roles and his portrayal of the rat-like Dathan in The Ten Commandments, Edward G. Robinson was actually an actor with a very broad range of work: comedies, dramas, historical epics, you name it. By 1944 he was age 51 and realized that his days as a leading man were coming to a close. His half comedic role as the insurance claims adjuster Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity he viewed as a step in his transition to being a character actor. Always a liberal, Robinson was blacklisted in Hollywood due to his affiliation with Communist front groups. Robinson admitted as much by an article he wrote for the American Legion Magazine entitled “How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me”. His comeback came when anti-Communist director Cecil B. DeMille, who thought that Robinson had been treated unfairly, cast him in the scene-stealing role of Dathan in The Ten Commandments.
Spoiler alerts in regard to the following: (more…)
American history tends to be ignored by Hollywood and therefore it is unusual for a battle to receive treatment in a Hollywood feature film. It is doubly unusual for a battle to be treated in two Hollywood feature films, but that is the case for the battle of New Orleans, the two hundred and ninth anniversary of which is coming up next week on January 8, 2024. The 1938 film The Buccaneer was directed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille and had Frederic March, an actor largely forgotten today but a major star in his time, as Jean Lafitte. Two future stars have bit parts in the film: Anthony Quinn and Walter Brennan. Hugh Sothern, who portrayed Andrew Jackson, would also portray Jackson in 1939 in the film Old Hickory.
The 1958 remake was also to have been directed by Cecil B. DeMille, but he was seriously ill at that time, and relegated himself to the role of executive producer, turning the director’s chair over to Anthony Quinn, his then son-in-law, the one and only film that Quinn ever directed. DeMille was unhappy with the film and it received fairly negative reviews, although I think the battle sequences are superior to the first film. Yul Brynner plays Jean Lafitte and Charlton Heston is a commanding Andrew Jackson. Like Hugh Sothern, Heston would portray Jackson twice, the first time being in The President’s Lady (1953), the tale of the great love story of Rachel Jackson (Susan Hayward) and Andrew Jackson. Future stars in this version include Inger Stevens, Claire Bloom and Lorne Green. Adequate coverage of the battle is given in each film, although not much detail. The battle of course is merely an adjunct to the romantic tale of Jean Lafitte. Without the pirate turned patriot, I am certain the battle of New Orleans would have likely received the same indifference that Hollywood has shown for most of American history.
All right. Let me think. This
happened many, many years ago.
Debby:
That's not the way to begin.
Stories start "Once upon a time".
Dudley:
Yes, that's true.
Once upon a time there was a little
boy and he lived in a little town.
Debby:
- What was his name?
Dudley:
- His name was David. He was a shepherd.
The town was called Bethlehem.
Debby:
I know Bethlehem. That's
where the star was.
Dudley:
That's right. Only David
lived long before the star.
One night, David was out in
the hills tending his sheep.
- He was playing the harp and singing.
Debby:
- Was he singing "Jingle Bells"?
Dudley:
No, no. "Jingle Bells"
hadn't been written then.
David was singing songs
that he wrote himself.
Suddenly, an angel came
down and spoke to David.
Debby:
- How did David know it was an angel?
Dudley:
- He didn't know.
And that's the way it always is.
Angels come and put
ideas into people's heads
and people feel very proud of themselves
because they think it was their own idea.
This angel said to David "One
of your lambs has strayed. "
So David put aside his harp and went
into the darkness to find the lamb.
The angel guided him.
And when David found the lamb,
he saw a great big ferocious lion.
Debby:
Oh!
Dudley:
So David said to the lion
"You get away from that lamb. "
And the lion said "You get away
from me or I'll eat you too. "
Debby:
- Did David run away?
Dudley:
- No.
You know why? Because the angel
put another idea into his head.
So David took out his
sling and he hurled a stone
and hit the lion right between the eyes.
Debby:
I bet that lion was surprised!
Dudley:
Yes. And so was David because he
didn't know an angel had helped him.
Well, he picked up the lamb
and took it back to the fold.
Then he felt so happy that he made
up another song. It started out:
"The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want. "
"He maketh me to lie
down in green pastures. "
"He leadeth me besides
the still waters. "
"He restoreth my soul... "
Screenplay The Bishop's Wife
A fine Christmas movie is The Bishop’s Wife from 1947. David Niven is an Episcopalian bishop of a struggling diocese; Loretta Young (ironically one of the more devout Catholics in the Hollywood of her time) is his wife; and Cary Grant is Dudley, one of the more unimportant angels in Heaven, sent by God to lend the Bishop a hand. The film is a graceful comedy which effectively and quietly underlines the central importance of faith in God as we see in this little scene when undercover angel Dudley, Cary Grant, uses his powers to summon a tardy boy’s choir for an unforgettable rendition of O Sing to God:
Produced by the Army in 1945 and narrated by actor Walter Huston, Know Your Enemy: Japan, directed by Frank Capra, helped explain to a war weary America why it was going to be a fight to the finish against the Japanese militarists. Mercifully Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the War to a conclusion before it became necessary for an American invasion of the Home Islands which would have almost certainly involved a million American casualties and tens of millions of Japanese casualties. If you want to place yourself into the mind of the average American in 1945 as to the showdown with the Empire of Japan, this film is an excellent starting point. Ironically the film was released on August 9, 1945 and quickly pulled from circulation due to the Japanese surrender.
I saw Oppenheimer (2023) with my Bride and son last Friday at a movie theater in Bloomington, Il. Oppeheimer was on two screens and our showing was filled to capacity. Cilian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey, Jr. as Admiral Lewis Strauss deserve Oscars for their performances. Both men disappeared into their roles. Matt Damon was very convincing as General Leslie Groves. The film was unlike anything I have seen before, and it runs three hours which pass swiftly. Spoilers to follow.
Going into the film I thought it had been overhyped. I was wrong. The film is divided into two parts, interspersed throughout the film. A black and white section featuring Admiral Strauss, the bete noir of Oppenheimer in post war hearings that led to the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and colored sections centering on Oppenheimer, focusing on his work as Director of the Manhattan Project, his tempestuous private life and his security woes after the War.
The colored sections have the look and feel of an epic classic from the fifties, as if DeMille had been brought back from the grave to direct these portions. There is a driving intensity to this portion of the film emphasized by the musical score as the US races Nazi Germany to the bomb. (In fact the US was far ahead, thanks in no small part to Der Fuehrer kindly making sure to cause the best physicists on the Continent, many of who whom were Jewish, to flee the ever growing Third Reich, but we didn’t know we were far ahead until near the end of the war in Europe.) The black and white portions are similar to security camera films, and have an eerie disquieting feel to them, with many viewers I am sure puzzling initially their relationship to the rest of the movie.
The film is a series of vignettes, with the black and white portions interspersed with the colored portions. Flashbacks are common. I know a great deal about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project; those who do not might be confused by all this but I think the basic story comes through.
The film reminded me of a musical composition in structure, rather than that of the structure of a conventional film Odd, but it works.
The film has a number of themes it returns to several times. One of them is a glass sphere and a large wine glass. They are set up by Oppenheimer in a lecture hall at Los Alamos with marbles placed in them, representing in the sphere the amount of uranium thus far produced for the eventual Little Boy, the bomb where the fission reaction was created by a gun firing a uranium projectile into an uranium target, which caused both the projectile and the target to go super critical causing the explosion, and in the wine glass the plutonium produced thus far for Fat Man, the bomb where an ingeniously constructed implosion would drive the plutonium core into a super critical state producing the explosion. As the marbles slowly increase in the film, we feel the tension as we know the creation of the bombs is coming closer.
The film has two nude scenes I wish had been kept out. Both involve Oppenheimer and his mistress who committed suicide in 1943. Neither scene is played for erotic titillation but rather to show that in his private life Oppenheimer was confused and lost. One of the scenes is played out when Oppenheimer is being grilled post war during the hearings that led to the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the shame and rage that Oppenheimer’s wife, who is with him at the hearing, feels toward her husband as his adultery is made part of an official record is palpable. His wife had an alcohol problem and at one point in the film Oppenheimer takes his infant son to a friend, whose left wing loyalties would later help lose Oppenheimer his security clearance, and asks him and his wife to take care of his son for a time, stating that he, Oppenheimer, and his wife are awful and selfish people, and that is a fair statement for much of Oppenheimer’s private life.
The film does an adequate job of showing the immense difficulties overcome in inventing and constructing the first atomic bombs and the successful partnership between Oppenheimer and Groves that was key to getting the job done. I wish there had been more, but the director clearly did not wish the main purpose of the film to be a historical retelling. The film instead is primarily a character study of Oppenheimer, warts and all.
The film is a wild roller coaster of a ride, which strongly impacts, eyes, ears and brain. It is sui generis and I highly recommend it. Be warned however. Whatever you are expecting, I think this film will surprise you.
There have been surprisingly few movies on D-Day, as indicated by the fact that three out of the five videos looked at below are from television miniseries. Here are the five best from a scarce lot:
5. Ike: The War Years (1978)
Robert Duvall as Eisenhower gives his usual riveting performance. The late Lee Remick gives a good performance as Captain Kay Summersby, the British driver/secretary assigned to Eisenhower. Unfortunately the miniseries centers around the relationship of Eisenhower and Summersby, a relationship which is subject to historical dispute.
4. Ike: Countdown to D-Day (1995)
Tom Selleck gives a very good portrayal of Eisenhower in the days leading up to D-Day. The video does a first rate job of portraying the problems that Eisenhower confronted: getting prima donnas like Montgomery and Patton to work as a part of a team, concerns about the weather, the deception campaign to convince the Nazis that Calais would be the invasion site, etc. The video also shines a light on the weight of responsibility which Eisenhower bore, especially when we see him write out a note just before the invasion taking full responsibility on his shoulders if it failed.
3. Band of Brothers (2001)
The epic miniseries covering the exploits of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, captures well the chaos of the parachute and glider operations behind German lines that were so critical a part of the Allied victory on D-Day. (more…)
Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Shelby Foote
It is fitting that Memorial Day arose out of our bloodiest war, our war without an enemy. Films to watch over the weekend:
10. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)-The showcase of this film biopic of Lincoln is the above depiction of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The debate portrayed has remarks culled from all the debates, is an excellent recreation of the main arguments made by each of the men, and is evocative of their speaking styles.
Ironically neither of the actors portraying Lincoln and Douglas were Americans. The actor portraying Douglas was Gene Lockhart, a Canadian. If his voice sounds vaguely familiar to you, it is probably because you recall him as the judge in Miracle on 34th Street. His daughter June Lockhart, of Lassie and Lost in Space fame, carried on the thespian tradition of the family.
Lincoln was portrayed by Raymond Massey, also a Canadian. Massey was one of the great actors of his day and bore a strong physical resemblance to Lincoln. Massey served in the Canadian Army in both World War I, where he saw combat on the Western Front as an artillery officer, and World War II, becoming a naturalized American citizen after World War II. Like Lincoln he was a Republican and made a TV ad for Goldwater in the 1964 campaign.
The film helps explain why the Civil War happened. A nation like America could not endure forever denying freedom to millions of Americans on the basis of race. That we did not free the slaves peacefully led to the most terrible war in our history.
9. Friendly Persuasion (1956)-Starring Gary Cooper as Jess Birdwell, the head of a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the Civil War, the film is a superb mix of drama and comedy as the Quakers have to determine whether to continue to embrace their pacifist beliefs or to take up arms against General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry during his Great Raid of the North in June-July of 1863. When the oldest son of the Birdwell family, portrayed by Anthony Perkins in his pre-Psycho days, takes up arms, his mother, played by Dorothy McGuire is aghast, but Cooper, as Jess Birdwell, defends him. Although he remains true to his pacifist convictions, Birdwell understands that his son is acting in obedience to his conscience, and, as he tells his wife, “A man’s life ain’t worth a hill of beans except he lives up to his own conscience.”
8. Major Dundee (1965)-Sam Pekinpah’s flawed, unfinished masterpiece, the film tells the fictional account of a mixed force of Union soldiers, and Confederate prisoners, who join forces to hunt and ultimately defeat an Apache raider, Sierra Charriba, in 1864-65. Charlton Heston gives an outstanding performance as Major Amos Dundee, a man battling his own personal demons of a failed military career, as he commands this Union-Confederate force through northern Mexico on the trail of the Apache, with fighting often threatening to break out between the Union and Confederate soldiers. Use of Confederate prisoners as Union soldiers in the West was not uncommon. Six Union infantry regiments of Confederate prisoners, called “Galvanized Yankees”, served in the West. The final section of the film involving a battle between Major Dundee’s force and French Lancers, the French occupying Mexico at the time, has always struck me as one of the best filmed combat sequences in any movie.
7. The Horse Soldiers (1959)-In 1959 John Ford and John Wayne, in the last of their “cavalry collaborations”, made The Horse Soldiers, a film based on Harold Sinclair’s novel of the same name published in 1956, which is a wonderful fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid.
Perhaps the most daring and successful Union cavalry raid of the war, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher and band leader from Jacksonville, Illinois, who, after being bitten by a horse at a young age, hated horses, led from April 17-May 2, 1863 1700 Illinois and Iowa troopers through 600 miles of Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to the Union held Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Grierson and his men ripped up railroads, burned Confederate supplies and tied down many times their number of Confederate troops and succeeded in giving Grant a valuable diversion as he began his movement against Vicksburg.
John Wayne gives a fine, if surly, performance as Colonel Marlowe, the leader of the Union cavalry brigade. William Holden as a Union surgeon serves as a foil for Wayne. Constance Towers, as a captured Southern belle, supplies the obligatory Hollywood love interest.
Overall the film isn’t a bad treatment of the raid, and the period. I especially appreciated two scenes. John Wayne refers to his pre-war activities as “Before this present insanity” and Constance Towers gives the following impassioned speech:
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’? You think our boys are asleep down here? Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”(more…)
“How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown?”
Cassius, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
Lincoln has been portrayed hundreds of times in films and on tv programs. I thought that no celebration of the 214th birthday of our sixteenth president would be complete without a few examples of how he has been portrayed on the formerly silver screen.
The film Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece, was controversial at its release and remains so. At three hours the film was a pioneering effort using then cutting age technology to produce a movie that stunned viewers by its cinematic quality. Its viewers had seen nothing like it in film entertainment before. At the same time the film, based on the pro-Ku Klux Klan novel TheClansman by Thomas Dixon, a friend of President Woodrow Wilson, drew outrage from Grand Army of the Republic Union Veterans and black groups with its depiction of the Klan as noble heroes attempting to fight against evil Unionists and its depiction of blacks as little better than beasts who walked erect. Race riots broke out in cities where the film was shown. President Wilson viewed the film in the White House and was reported to have said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”. The White House denied the remark, and in the wake of continuing protests, Wilson eventually condemned the “unfortunate production”. The film used quotes from Wilson’s scholarly works to buttress its negative depiction of Reconstruction and its positive depiction of the Klan. Considering the fact that Wilson imposed segregation on the Civil Service it is difficult to discern what he found to be “unfortunate” about the film.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 