war

NAPOLEON: but didn’t they name a complex after this guy?

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Photo caption: Joaquin Phoenix in NAPOLEON. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Of all living filmmakers, Ridley Scott would seem the most well-equipped to pull off a boundless EPIC, but his Napoleon, other than three spectacular battle scenes and a little sex, is boring, underwhelming and a little confounding. As The Wife said exiting the theater, it’s a slog, and she wasn’t referring to the winter retreat from Moscow.

For better or worse, Napoleon covers Napoleon Bonaparte’s entire public career – from his emergence in 1793 at age 24 to the beginning of his final captivity on St. Helena in 1815 at the age of 46. It’s kinda like a college survey course in the Napoleonic Era. Napoleon’s historical accuracy is solid, and, for a Hollywood movie, remarkably unusual.

Even with a running time of 2 hours and 38 minutes, there’s a lot of ground to cover. He did fight 61 battles, and it took the SEVENTH Coalition of opposing nations to defeat him. So, we get the briefest of glimpses of Napoleon’s mother, his second wife and other major figures in his life and times.

Here’s what is great about Napoleon – three extraordinarily spectacular battle scenes, depicting the Siege of Toulon, and the famous Battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo. They are amazing to watch, and the first two help us to understand Napoleon’s military genius (and the third, Wellington’s military genius). A segment of Austerlitz where Napoleon orders cannon fire to break the ice under enemy forces is one of greatest and most unforgettable battle scenes in cinema history.

Napoleon also does a pretty fair job with the the relationship between Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). It was a very uncomplicated one: he was utterly captivated by and devoted to her, and she just wasn’t that IN to him. Josephine was a survivor and an adventuress, who navigated through her misogynistic environment with a gift for canny manipulation. He finds that even making her an empress isn’t enough to quell her promiscuity. Phoenix and Kirby do a good job with this part of the story.

But, oddly for a biopic, Napoleon fails to help us understand Napoleon. Sure, he’s ambitious from the start, but why? And why does he need to keep conquering, at the risk of overreaching and losing everything? After all, didn’t they name a complex after this guy?

Joaquin Phoenix was so vivid as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, as Commodus in Gladiator, and as Freddie in The Master; he was so original and authentic in Her and C’mon C’mon. But, in Napoleon, his performance doesn’t unwrap the package of Napoleon’s psyche. I can’t say it’s Phoenix’a fault, but the collaboration between Phoenix, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa doesn’t pay off.

Scott does point out in an end title that 3 million lost their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, which raises the question, to what end? This guy with an insatiable appetite for power and conquest was starting wars with some twits who had been born into underserved monarchy.

Here’s a random digression from the movie Napoleon. Was Napoleon’s military prowess overrated? This is ironic, because Napoleon rose on his merits. But the forces he was defeating were led by royalty and aristocrats, who were given command of armies, not by their own training and demonstrated skills, but by the accident of birth. Alexander I of Russia, for example, started out as an immature, headstrong nitwit and aged into a fullblown nutcase. Maybe Napoleon was analogous to MLB Hall of Famers who never had to face black ballplayers. Hmmm.

Napoleon is now in theaters, and will stream on AppleTV on a date TBD.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: the trauma of war

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Photo caption: Felix Kammerer in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Courtesy of Netflix.

The anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front unforgettably makes two points: war, in general, is a traumatizing experience and WW I, in particular, was disgustingly senseless.

The screenplay was adapted from the famous Erich Maria Remarque novel, as was the 1930 Lewis Milestone cinematic masterpiece. Since the story is told from the point of view of a German infantry recruit, Netflix commissioned a German director and cast for this version. That director is German filmmaker Edward Berger, who has been working in US television over the past decade. The actors may be German and Austrian, but they speak English in this movie.

Paul (Felix Kammerer) is a callow youth who, with his friends, is swept away by patriotic fervor and enlists in the German Army just in time to participate in the last few months of WW I. Both sets of belligerents have been grappling for years in the mire of trench warfare, suffering mass casualties for the sake of a few hundred yards here and there. The conditions between battles are horrific, and the battles are more so. Paul endures the terror of bombardment, gas attacks, invulnerable enemy tanks and charges across no-man’s land in the face of machine gunfire. The hand-to-hand combat is especially savage.

Kammerer, in his first screen role, is exceptional as an Everyman who experiences physical and mental exhaustion, dread, panic, shock, guilt and hopelessness.

The battle scenes are superbly photographed by cinematographer James Friend, who has 71 screen credits, not a one suggesting that he was capable of anything this masterful.

War may be traumatizing, but this eminently watchable film is not. All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix.

on TV: ASHES AND DIAMONDS: a killer wants to stop

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Photo caption: Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Coming up November 15 on Turner Classic Movies, a masterful director and his charismatic star ignite the war-end thriller Ashes and Diamonds, set amidst war-end treachery. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.

It’s the end of WW II and the Red Army has almost completely liberated Poland from the Nazis. The future governance of Poland is now up in the air, and the Polish resistance can now stop killing Germans and start wrestling for control. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a young but experienced soldier in the Resistance. His commanders assign him to assassinate a communist leader.

Maciek is very good at targeted killing, but he’s weary of it. As he wants out, he finds love. But his commander is insisting on this one last hit.

This is Zbigniew Cybulski’s movie. Often compared to James Dean, Cybulski emanates electricity and unpredictability, Unusual for a leading man, he often wore glasses in his screen roles. He had only been screen acting for four years when he made Ashes and Diamonds. Cybulski died nine years later when hit by a train at age forty,

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Andrzej Wajda fills the movie with striking visuals, such as viewing Maciek’s love interest, the waitress Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), alone amidst the detritus of last night’s party, through billows of cigarette smoke. Wajda’s triumphant signature is, literally, fireworks at the climax; the juxtaposition of the celebratory fireworks with Maciek’s emotional crisis is unforgettable.

Ewa Krzyzewska in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Wajda adapted a famous 1948 Polish novel into this 1958 movie. In the adaptation, the filmmaker changed the emphasis from one character to another.

Ashes and Diamonds was the third feature for Andrzej Wajda, who became a seminal Polish filmmaker and received an honorary Oscar. US audiences may remember his 1983 art house hit Danton with Gerard Depardieu.

Ashes and Diamonds can be streamed from Amazon and AppleTV. It was featured at the 2020 Noir City film festival.

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER: a blowhard plans a stunt, gets an education

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Photo caption: Zak Efron and Russell Crowe in THE GREATEST BEER RUB EVER. Courtesy of AppleTV.

In the surprisingly thoughtful anti-war comedy The Greatest Beer Run Ever, an ignorant blowhard’s neighborhood pals are serving in the Vietnam War, and he thinks he can uplift their spirits by bringing them beer. It’s a plot too idiotic to be credible – except that it really happened.

Our protagonist is Chickie (Zak Efron), a slacker ne’er-do-well (although we didn’t call them slackers back then) who has the intellectual curiosity of a stump. Offended by non-rah rah media coverage of the Vietnam War and by the burgeoning anti-war protest movement, he thinks a simplistic gesture is in order. As a merchant marine, he actually has means to GET TO Vietnam – by signing on a freighter. So, off he goes, with a duffel packed with cans of beer.

Once he is on the ground in country, of course, he sees that press is accurately reporting that the war is not going well and that the LBJ Administration and the military commanders are indeed lying about it. He learns that not all Vietnamese welcome Americans. And that war is very, very dangerous and very, very scary. Nor do his pals all welcome his crazy stunt.

A lesser director could have made this film as an empty-headed Bro comedy, only about the stunt itself. But Peter Farrelly, as he did with the Oscar-winning Green Book, has made an entertaining movie about a serious human experience.

And give Farrelly credit for something rarely seen in a Hollywood Vietnam War movie – Vietnamese characters are more than cardboard cutouts. Chickie has interactions with a goofy traffic cop, a savvy bartender and, most stirringly, a peasant mother and her young daughter in the countryside. The carnage and grieving among Vietnamese of all persuasions is depicted, too.

That being said, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a very funny film, with most of the humor stemming from Chickie’s dunderheadness and the military characters all assuming that an American civilian asking for a helicopter ride into a combat zone MUST be CIA.

The very underrated Zak Efron carries the movie as Chickie gets force fed a life-changing reality check. Russell Crowe is excellent as a world-weary war correspondent. Bill Murray, without a single wink at the camera, is perfect as the lads’ bar owner, a WW II vet who just doesn’t get it. Matt Cook is very funny as a junior Army officer who idolizes the CIA.

Make sure you watch the closing credits.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is streaming on AppleTV.

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

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SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

DE GAULLE: a man and his moment

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Photo caption: Lambert Wilson in DE GAULLE. Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

De Gaulle takes us to a pivotal moment in French WW II history that is no longer well-understood by most Americans. The French Army has collapsed in the face of German invasion, and the fall of Paris is both inevitable and imminent. The French government is considering asking Hitler for an armistice, seeking to end the slaughter and to repatriate its 2 million POWs.  

Charles de Gaulle (Lambert Wilson) is also losing his battle to convince the government not to surrender, but to keep fighting the Nazis from outside France itself, based in France’s colonial possessions. In this moment of catastrophe, de Gaulle is virtually alone in imagining that Great Britain, joined by America’s industrial might, could someday liberate France. It doesn’t help that, for the authoritarian and anti-Semitic French military establishment, Hitler isn’t so abhorrent.

Writer-director Gabriel Le Bomin has focused De Gaulle on only two weeks of WW II history – between June 5 and June 19, 1940. Every minute counts – and the clock is ticking.

It’s a similar approach as in Darkest Hour, where all of the story takes place in May, 1940, as Churchill is facing England’s moment of existential peril. In fact, the Darkest Hour (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and HBO Max) would complete an excellent double feature with De Gaulle.

The tension is enhanced with a parallel thread – the political crisis has isolated de Gaulle in London while his family, completely out of communication, is scrambling to escape the Nazis in France.

Aloof, shy and an egomaniac, de Gaulle was easily dislikeable. Le Bomin has humanized him by including his most relatable attributes – his relationship with his wife and kids, especially his daughter with Down’s Syndrome.

Le Bomin and Wilson had to meet high expectations on the portrayal of an icon. After all, De Gaulle’s appearance, speech and mannerisms are as familiar to a French audience as those of Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Muhammad Ali are to an American one.

I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Lambert Wilson for the role. Wilson, known for the Matrix franchise, is handsome and physically graceful. But, for starters, Wilson is tall enough, at 6-2, to play de Gaulle, just under 6-5. Prosthetics and makeup completed the physical transformation. Wilson’s acting craft took him the rest of the way – capturing de Gaulle’s stiffness and the physical awkwardness that some very tall people have.

I streamed De Gaulle on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.

ATOMIC COVER-UP: the truth will out

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ATOMIC COVER-UP

The understated but brilliant documentary Atomic Cover-up reveals the story of the long-hidden eyewitness film record of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japanese film crews immediately filmed the carnage and destruction, which was quickly suppressed by the Japanese military. Within a month, the US occupation forces were in charge, and American filmmakers took over the filming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, often with Japanese crews. Censorship continued under the US military.

The films have now escaped the censors and are seen in Atomic Cover-up with the testimonies of the original Japanese and American cameramen. As told matter-of-factly by the men who captured these images, it’s a great story.

I screened Atomic Cover-up for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

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Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

The 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a remarkably textured portrait of a man over four decades and his struggles to evolve into new eras. Written and directed by the great British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is a movie with a sharp message to 1940s audiences about modernity, as well as a subtle exploration of privilege that will resonate today.

The character of Clive Candy, when we first seem him as an old man, is the butt of a humorous scene, being made fun of as out of touch and ridiculously old-fashioned. Candy, a veteran of sabre duels between 19th Century gentleman officers, still naively thinks that wars should be fought according to rules. Made in the urgency of wartime 1943, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp pointedly delivers the message that the old fuddy duddies should get out of the way. Only modern men can fight the quintessentially modern threat – the Nazis with their propaganda and industrialized genocide.

But Powell and Pressburger can make this argument without emasculating or demonizing Blimp; he is a good man, just a good man whose time has passed – and it is what it is.

We see flashbacks of the younger Clive Candy and see his bravery, steadfastness, loyalty, sentimentality, romance, and his occasional wit. He is a man devoted to a code of behavior. always profoundly anchored to doing the right thing and willing to sacrifice (in both love and war).

Candy is also a creature of privilege, and he’s clueless about that privilege. He is an upper crust Englishman in a class-driven, all male and all-white power structure. His day job is serving an empire whose premise is the suppression and exploitation of darker skinned peoples peoples. He never has to compete, on the merits, with women or with the working class or people of color. He just assumes that he should be a military leader and that England should have an empire; but he also unquestionably shoulders the duties and obligations that goes with the leadership and the empire.

Roger Livesey plays Candy as he ages over the forty years. Livesey often played decent and genial romantic leads, and I usually find those roles pretty bland. But here Livesey convincingly depicts a man who believes that he must never change, even as he faces heartbreak or changing times.

Anton Walbrook excels as Candy’s German peer, an officer of Candy’s generation who realizes in the 1940s that their time has passed. I’ve lately warmed to Walbrook, who was typecast as romantic, European dandies early in his career; his later work, in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The 49th Parallel, Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir and La Ronde and the 1940, less well known version of, Gaslight, is excellent.

The always coolly reliable Deborah Kerr appears in multiple roles, playing three different women who show up in Candy’s life.

Powell and Pressburger insert plenty of humor and smart filmmaking to tell this story. The montage of mounted animal heads that spans the period between the world wars is especially witty.

Clive Candy is a creature of his time – which TLADOCB unsentimentally depicts as having passed. But there is value in this man. Just like with Wille Loman – attention must be paid.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp airs October 15 on Turner Clssic Movies and is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV and the Criterion Channel.

Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

APOCALYPSE ’45: I never visualized hell being that bad

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APOCALYPSE ’45

The powerful documentary Apocalypse ’45 takes never-before-seen footage of WWII action and blends it into an experience that brings new insights to familiar history.

Apocalypse ’45 takes on the war in the Pacific in 1944 and 1945; the Japanese military knew that its defeat was inevitable, and their strategy was to avoid unconditional surrender by making its price to the Americans too painful. What happened was horrible, and filmmaker Erik Nelson helps us appreciate that with his spare construction – Apocalypse ’45 is essentially three elements – the film itself, the voice over by survivors and starkly evocative titles.

First, Nelson selected from 700 reels of archival film from the National Archive, digitally restored in 4K. It’s in color, and that makes a huge difference to those of us who have to be reminded that WWII was not fought in black and white.

The color and the 4K restoration makes these events look like we were living through them, too, and humanizes the people in the film, making them more relatable. The feeling for the audience is similar to what Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old did for those who fought WWI. The somber fatalism of Marines in landing craft and the joyous relief of sailors and Marines in victory parades are palpable.

The shipboard footage of kamikaze attacks and the pilot’s eye views of strafing missions are breathtaking. The footage of a morass with a movie clapboard “Route 1 Okinawa Mud” helps us understand the challenges of moving an army through muck, even without enemy fire.

A few nonagenarians and centenarians have still survived WWII, and Nelson adds their memories in voice overs. Their reflections are unvarnished, and some of the Marines’ views of the Japanese adversaries are hard to hear. But the overall effect is an understanding of how awful this was:

  • About the planned invasion of Japan: “We didn’t think that the war would end before 1949.”
  • About the use of flamethrowers: “The smell was terrible…They could run (on fire) about 20 yards and that was it.”
  • “War is hell, but I never visualized hell being that bad.”
  • In the amazing account of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor: “That’s when everything blew up.”

Nelson ties together the footage and the testimonies with stark white-on-black titles, all the more chilling by their matter of factness. About the liberation of the Philippines): “100,000 civilians and the entire defending Japanese Army were killed” (and, indeed, 93% of the 350,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors died). About the fire bombing of Tokyo: 100,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated.

Nelson’s titles tell how the US manufactured enough Purple Heart medals for the invasion of Japan, based on American casualties in the conquest of Okinawa. After the surrender, those Purple Heart medals were warehoused – and the stockpile has been sufficient to supply every American conflict since 1945.

As Apocalypse ’45 begins, it may seem like a regular WW II documentary with some new imagery, but it becomes more and more powerful as the images, personal testimonies and narrative titles have their effect.

Apocalypse ’45 is now streaming on Virtual Cinema and eventive; I watched it at the Pruneyard Cinemas. It will premiere on the Discovery Channel on Labor Day weekend.

DATELINE-SAIGON: the truth will out

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David Halberstam (left) and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON

Dateline-Saigon documents the efforts of five journalists to cover the Vietnam War in the face of a US government which did not want the facts to be told. The five were Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, Horst Faas, David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, who amassed a bucket of Pulitzers between them.

What they found in Vietnam was that American policy was not working, because (among many factors) the Diem regime was alienating most of its own population, the South Vietnamese Army was less motivated to fight than the Viet Cong, and that Americans were more directly involved in combat than had been acknowledged. And the US government didn’t want any of this reported.

As Dateline-Saigon says, “When these patriotic journalists arrive in Vietnam, they had no idea they would become the enemy“, meaning the truth-wielding enemy of the US government propaganda. The reporters describe the government efforts to obscure, mislead, spin, hide and controvert the facts as a “vast lying machine” and the “Truth Suppressors”.

Quang Lien and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON (AP Photo)

All television news viewers (especially a ten-year-old The Movie Gourmet) were shocked by the 1963 Buddhist monk’s self-immolation to protest the Diem regime in 1963. No one was more shocked than Browne, who was covering the Buddhist march, and, to his surprise and horror, had this unfold a few steps in front of him.

Sheehan is famous for uncovering the Pentagon Papers. Beginning with The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam banged out bestseller after bestseller on 20th century American history. Arnett went to cover dozens of conflicts interview Osama Bin-Laden and was a major media face of the Iraq War.

This is a Must See for students of journalism and of the Vietnam War Era of American History. You can stream Dateline-Saigon on iTunes.