War Movies VI: Other Reviewers

In the course of preparing my most recent war movie post I found two good war movie review sites, Sgt. Slaughter and Herr General. I should also mention the very good review section on Strategy Page. These are interesting and thoughtful reviews, and where I was familiar with the movies, I generally agreed with them.

I’ll mention one old favorite, Kelly’s Heroes that was reviewed on both Strategy Page and by Sgt. Slaughter. A very strange movie, set in World War II, but with a very late-60s feel to it. Donald Sutherland is a tank commander named Oddball, who is supposedly in 1944 but who seems like he just stepped out of a cloud of pot smoke in Haight Asbury in 1969. Clint Eastwood and Don Rickles in the same movie? Like I said, nutty. The GIs in this movie, led by Clint, are out to liberate a stash of gold bars from the Germans, but inadvertently precipitate a major breakthrough for the Allies. The final scene where Oddball’s tanks stalk German Tigers through the narrow streets of a French town is incredibly cool. Filmed in Yugoslavia, the movie looks like 1940s France. And this movie has more genuine equipment rolling around than any war movie other than A Bridge Too Far — about which I will go on and on some other time � .

(And checkout the incredible custom army guys available on this site. You can get an unpainted Oddball head (scroll down) to stick on your super-expensive, super-detailed GI Joe-type guy. The war toys for grown-ups you can find on the Net are simply breathtaking. Dig this Delta Force guy.)

UPDATE: Earlier war movie posts: A review of Downfall, and of We Were Soldiers, and 2 Korean War
movies, a post about the excellent essay “The Serpent’s Eye: The Cinema of 20th-Century Combat”, and my initial post of favorite war movies.

War Movies V: The Four Feathers and Others Set in the British Empire

I saw the remake of The Four Feathers (2002) a few years ago, when it came out. And a few days ago I finally got and viewed the classic 1939 original, (see this comparison). The oldie was better, but both movies had strengths and weaknesses and both are worth seeing. (Wretchard had a good comparison of the book — full text online here — to the remake. Wretchard also wove in a discussion of Churchill’s The River War — full text online here.)

The 2002 version’s strength is its excellent production values: gorgeous English countryside, sun-drenched Sudanese dunes, crisp scarlet tunics, ruddy-cheeked young men playing rugby in the mud, realistic-looking columns of men marching in the desert heat, etc. Those of a historical bent will get a charge out seeing these scenes set in the1880s lovingly recreated, and that is where most of the film’s merit lies. But like any period piece done lately, it ultimately fails to convince. The actors of today are simply too pretty and too vacant to depict the men and women of sterner days and stricter moral codes. Heath Ledger is a man of moderate talents, and Kate Hudson, has some charm but seems best suited for comedy. These two fell short in these more challenging roles, set in an earlier world of hard duties and demanding loves. So the core characters Harry Faversham and Ethne Burroughs, while pretty to look at, lack density. For example, the bodily deportment of the actors is not what one would expect from looking at period photographs, or from reading about the lives and beliefs of the people of those days. They look like modern Americans, uncomfortable in the period garb. The dialogue too often falls far short, frequently jarring any suspension of disbelief as well. And the screenwriters are such creatures of television that they cannot do sustained, coherent narrative, so the film is choppy and episodic, a series of images not a story. Everything is a music video these days.

The director attempted to construct an anti-imperialist superstructure on top of an old-fashioned story that is inconsistent with current views. The story prevailed. I read an interview where he talked about how the film would be “ambiguous” and “post-colonial”. After a rather pompous scrolling text at the beginning, decrying imperialism, the film quickly began to look pretty unambiguous. Courage is good, betraying your country or especially your friends is bad, the redcoats are better than the Mahdists, etc. The introduction of an African character who helps Harry infiltrate behind Mahdist lines was meant, I suppose, to make the whole thing more post-colonial, but all it ends up doing is creating a stereotyped image of a black servant voluntarily aiding his white master out of loyalty, instead of a stereotyped stiff-lipped white adventurer going it alone. Not much progress in seven decades. All that said, the movie has many solid moments, including one excellent battle scene. I was sitting in the theatre next to my wife, and as the dervishes approached a British column in a cloud of dust, I said aloud “form square!” an instant before the officer on screen did, which got a quizzical “how did you know?” from my wife, who should be used to this sort of thing from me. Notably, one actor, Wes Bentley, playing the character Jack Durrance, was impeccable in every way. There are always islands of competence even in such mediocre times as these, and one is occasionally lucky enough to stumble on them. Keep your eye on Wes Bentley.

The 1939 version of The Four Feathers is available on DVD and is probably the better film, though it shows its age. It is done on a grand scale, with very large battle scenes, shot on location in the Sudan. The acting and screen-writing are solid and efficient, in the old-school, theatre-trained way the British were once so good at. This very neat, orderly and linear cinematic style is something we are not accustomed to any longer. Also, the old-fashioned combat sequences tend to bloodless and painless, and hence unconvincing, by our modern standards. The acting style is pre-Method. Harry is played as a penitent who must atone for his betrayal, and this is crisply portrayed by the able but little-known actor John Clements. Durrance is played by Ralph Richardson, a stalwart of British cinema, whose career spanned over 50 years. Richardson’s Durrance is competently handled, but is a relatively undeveloped character, compared to Bentley’s. June Duprez is a superior Ethne, a cooler, more controlled yet deeper-seeming figure who carries herself well and who is more believable as a young woman of the 1880s. The dervishes are depicted as brave but cruel. The racial elements in this older film will make anyone highly sensitive to PC issues break out in a rash.

While I’m at it, I’ll mention some other memorable movies set in the heyday of the Empire.

Two excellent movies set in South Africa gives us diametric views of the British Empire and its army. Zulu (1964) starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker, depicts the battle of Roark’s Drift in 1879, in which 140 Welshmen held off 4,000 Zulus. No other movie better captures the red-coated army which conquered so much of the world against vast odds, at least as much through discipline as technology. Color-Sergeant Bourne is the perfect unperturbable non-com (Here is the real Bourne). The Welshmen singing “Men of Harlech” is very stirring. (See this excellent selection of quotes from the movie, and posters.)

Breaker Morant (1980) depicts the nasty counter-guerilla struggle at the trailing end of the Boer War. Australian troops under Col. Morant, following the orders of their British commanders, execute Boer prisoners found wearing British khaki uniforms. The film is done in flashback from the Australians’ court martial. The trial is rigged with perjured testimony from the cynical British leadership. A realistic depiction of troops under the stress of a guerrilla struggle, and a timeless depiction of the perfidy of military leadership sacrificing subordinates for political reasons.

Another quite good movie set during Britain’s Victorian-Edwardian apex is Young Winston (1972) (And here), with Simon Ward as the youthful Winston Churchill, and Anne Bancroft and Robert Shaw in strong supporting roles as his parents, Randolph and Jennie Churchill. The film is based on, and closely follows, Churchill’s memoir, My Early Life (Mentioned in this post). The film contains, among other good moments, the British cavalry charge, at Omdurman. Churchill wisely sheathes his saber mid-charge and relies instead on a Mauser pistol to work execution upon various sword-wielding Sudanese.

The preliminary to the Sudan campaign is depicted in the movie Khartoum (1966), which has some good mass-battle scenes, including some footage nicked from the 1939 Four Feathers. Khartoum stars Charleton Heston as “Chinese” Gordon, and Laurence Olivier in an over-the-top performance as the Mahdi, spiritual leader of a howling mob of Muslim dervishes brandishing long, sharp knives. I saw this movie as a child. I was traumatized by the Mahdi’s howling ululations when he is presented with Gordon’s severed head. That scene remains one of my most horrid childhood memories.

Finally, Errol Flynn’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) is a nice period piece, with its unabashedly pro-British Empire slant, a very dashing Flynn, with his usual female lead, the reliable Olivia De Havilland. A somewhat slow pace is redeemed by the terrific cavalry charge at the end: “cannon to the left of them, cannon to the right of them, cannon before them, volleyed and thundered.” Into the valley of death they rode, and of course Flynn goes down fighting.

I could have added many more films to this list. The British Empire will, in addition, I am sure, inspire many movies in the future. So many episodes deserve the full-blown cinematic treatment. What is probably too much to hope for is that the film-makers will downplay the ideological preaching, and try to show the people, conquerors and conquered and bystanders, as they understood themselves, not as symbols in our current ideological and political struggles.

Confrontation at the LA Times Book Festival (etc.)

I got an excellent email from a friend of mine out in LA, which touches on issues of interest to our readers, which he has permitted me to share with you.

Over the weekend, I went to the LA Times Book Festival-a huge event with authors shilling books in lectures, panels, and readings. It’s not as good as the Chicago Humanities Festival, but not bad. I avoided some panels on current events and attended others, with mixed results. On one panel I heard Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Cohen, and Ross Terrill. These were well-informed and thoughtful people, and as a result they spoke in reasoned and measured ways, yet with clear ideas. Bacevich was particularly impressive. His view is that America is over reliant on military power as the central element in its foreign policy. There are several reasons why this came about: it is widely believed that the Soviet Union collapsed because of US military advances and pressures; and in the immediate wake of that collapse, the Gulf War led Americans to believe that we had such overwhelming military power that we could now meet any threat. Our dominance in the world, he argues, is no accident thrust upon us by the collapse of rivals and the emergence of external dangers; it is a deliberate process to protect our way of life. The core of that way of life is freedom, but each individual is left to define freedom for himself. In practice, this means that our common ground is material abundance, and we elect our leaders to assure a dominance in the world that will preserve and increase our material abundance. In pursuit of this policy, however, we have come to be excessively reliant on military power. Bacevich is a former military man, and his analysis is not intended as a liberal diatribe but as a sober conservative estimate.

Ross Terrill had excellent and nuanced things to say about China, including that it is not a real threat. The Chinese are an empire in a fairly traditional mold patterned on their history. This includes the subjugation of western regions of China that are not Chinese. In the world, they are pursuing a mainly defensive strategy, making sure that nothing happens that is inimical to their interests. Their huge trade surplus with the United States is not a real worry, because it is in their interests to continue it, not to use it as an instrument of a more or less pointless confrontation. He actually foresees a lengthy period in which the United States and China are likely to have rather cooperative relations. Cohen paints a hair-raising picture of instability in the former Soviet Union and argues forcefully that American policy has made all the wrong moves, increasing instability and dangers in that area. It is a mistake to think the Russians have no options; they have many opportunities to cause mischief and are increasingly in a situation that encourages them to do so. In this brief compass, I can’t do justice to the speakers, but they certainly made compelling points.

A later panel was the usual left / right setup on the question, “Is the World Safer for Democracy?” The audience is overwhelmingly extremely liberal, not to say outright leftist. Hence, the man you know who is the editor of the Claremont Review didn’t get much of a hearing, though he made some good points. David Rieff argued that we’re too willing to use war as a solution to problems. He conceded that as a reporter in Sarajevo, he had supported the use of force and he still insists that both neo-conservatives and human rights activists are in a strange alliance to use force for lofty motives. But he’s increasingly skeptical about it. Otherwise, we got some clichéd positions.

The highlight, however, was a question from a Marine sergeant who asked the most left member of the panel what her qualifications were for saying the Iraq venture was a failure. She prudently responded by asking him what his experience was, and in concise and articulate terms he said that most of the people-and he had been in the Falloujah fight-appreciated what the US forces were doing. She then asked him how he responded to the numbers of troops who were objecting to the war. If she thought she had him, she was quite mistaken. He commented that most of them were not combat or front-line troops. As a result, they suffered all the problems of a tour of duty-separation from family, home, jobs, etc.-but didn’t get close enough to the situation to receive the thanks and appreciation of the people they were helping. His comments posed a serious dilemma for the crowd. They wanted to applaud him to show that they really supported the troops and it was that monster Bush who was putting them in harm’s way (“Support our troops-bring them home” line) but he was a distressingly articulate and directly informed advocate of the current policy. The crowd contented themselves with shouting down the conservative from Claremont.

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Quote of the Day

“She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes in.”

(Quiz: Who was this said about? –No fair to use Google or the equivalent, either!)

2005 Pulitzers

The Pulitzers included two works that we have posted about this year. The history choice is an old favorite; Lexington’s first mention of David Hackett Fischer appears to be in 2003 and he appears in twelve more of Lexington’s posts. (Isn’t the new search engine great?) This year, Washington’s Crossing won; Fischer told the New York Times,“My Washington was a figure who took me very much by surprise,” he said. “What he did was bring together the values of the American Revolution with the conducting of the war.” Lexington’s summing up essay this January of books read noted it was a “Superb book about Washington and his army, the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton.” He then notes that Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom is on his “to do” list.

The Poetry prize went to Ted Kooser, for Delights and Shadows. The New York Times noted: “Clarity is the hallmark of Mr. Kooser’s style, with deceptively modest metaphors grounded in the Nebraska landscape.” I put a note up when Kooser was named Poet Laureate last year.