WW II

NUREMBERG: matching wits with a master manipulator

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Photo caption: Russell Crowe (left) and Rami Malek (right) in NUREMBERG. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The psychodrama Nuremberg pits the Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe) against the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) in a high stakes battle of wits. It’s the end of WW II, the full extent of the Holocaust is just being revealed and the Allies are ready to hold the world’s first war crimes trial.

With the suicides of Hitler and Himmler, Goering is undeniably the highest ranking and highest profile surviving Nazi leader. He and other top Nazis are in a military prison run by the US Army, where Dr. Kelley is assigned. The Army’s interest in the defendants’ mental heath was not primarily humanitarian – it was in preventing their suicides so they could be executed by hanging.

Kelley’s intellectual curiosity, though, is alive with the opportunity that any behavioral scientist would envy – probing the psyches of the men with the worst ever human behavior; these are the men who thought the unthinkable and acted to realize it. (And, more prosaically, he hopes to garner material for a profitable book.)

The lead American prosecutor is US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), who has to make up the jurisdiction and rules, even the charges, for the trial as he goes along. Nuremberg reminds us that the trial was about more than criminal justice; perhaps even more importantly, the trial was a vehicle to show the world, especially the German people, the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity, a term coined by Jackson for the trial. Accordingly, the Allied prosecutors made and showed films documenting the extermination camps. These images were not yet widely viewed at the time, and Malek shows Kelley’s revulsion at seeing the atrocities for the first time.

Nuremberg also reminds us that trying Nazi leaders would come at some considerable risk – the possibility that some of the defendants could make themselves sympathetic or martyrs, or, worst of all, even get off scot-free.

Kelley immediately tags Goering as a narcissist, a diagnosis which Goering himself does not dispute. Goering is uncommonly crafty and sly, tempering his his characteristic arrogance with a jovial charm that even threatens to seduce Kelley. Indeed, climbing to the top of a pyramid of back-stabbers was no mean feat, and Goering’s skills at political infighting and social climbing are formidable. Similarly, he possesses a gift to read the room and accordingly flatter and insinuate. Goering even has the hubris to believe that he will be able to manipulate his way out of a conviction.

With some hubris of his own, Jackson is eager to win a match of wits with Goering, planning to break him on the stand. Kelley, who has seen Goering’s charm and intellect up close, thinks that Jackson is likely to lose a frontal assault and perceives that Goering’s vulnerability lies elsewhere.

The Allied officials, including Kelley initially, intuit that any person who committed such monstrous acts must be some unique kind of monster. In 1946, the concept of the banality of evil was still fifteen years away from being coined by Hannah Arendt at the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann. Kelley meets all of the Nuremberg defendants, who Nuremberg accurately depicts as the motley group they were – this one a hoodlum, that one a psychotic crank. Rudolf Hess is depicted as befuddled (or ACTING befuddled as he faked amnesia for the second time). Of course, the Nazis were bullies, and bullies are always less fearsome when they are held to account.

The people who committed the most horrific acts in human history are surprisingly, even disappointingly, ordinary. For every deranged megalomaniac who comes to power, there are plenty of opportunistic thugs who go along for the ride.

Similarly, Kelley finds that Goering is such a greedy, attention-seeking asshole, that he was happy to play along with exploiting racial hatred, even to the point of genocide, just to become richer, more famous and more powerful.

In an impressive performance, Russell Crowe captures Goering’s narcissistic entitlement, magnetic charm, manipulative sociopathy and seemingly unshakable self-confidence.

Kelley starts out with his own hubris, confident that he holds all the cards vis-a-vis Goering, who is not himself a trained psychiatrist and is, after all, locked in a prison cell. Malek is able to portray Kelley’s sense of himself as far more fragile than one would expect, with the potential to become a tragic figure.

John Slattery is very good as a straight-ahead Army prison commander, as is Colin Hanks as an unapologetically venal rival shrink.

In scenes intended to reveal Kelley’s own humanity and manipulations, the character of Goering’s wife Emmy (Lotte Verbeek) is written with too much sympathy for my taste. In real life, Emmy Goering was a real piece of work, who vied with Joseph Goebbel’s wife to outdo Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun as the most prominent figure in the Nazi Reich and who was an enthusiastic looter of Jewish-owned fine art.

The 2023 The Zone of Interest was a masterpiece on the banality of evil. On this subject, I also recommend Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary and, for the Indonesian version of banality of evil, the wonderful documentary Act of Killing. For sheer gall that supassed even Goering’s, there’s another documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood, in which we hear recordings of Albert Speer pitching a Hollywood movie to rehabilitate his image.

Even casual students of history know that Goering didn’t escape conviction, but Nuremberg, in the tradition of fine courtroom dramas, is able to keep the audience hooked on how Goering, Kelley and Jackson will perform at the trial, and whether Goering will destroy anyone else. Nuremberg open in theaters this Friday.

ACT OF VIOLENCE: stunned into terror and self-loathing

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Van Heflin (right) in ACT OF VIOLENCE

You could argue that Act of Violence is the single most underrated film noir, because a story of moral relativity and situational ethics is told as a thrilling man hunt, with two career-topping performances and a starkly photographed nighttime chase through Los Angeles’ seamy Bunker Hill. Just like the top tier films in the film noir canon, Act of Violence has it all. I’m writing about it today because it’s playing on on Turner Classic Movies on Friday night, and it’s not available to stream.

WW II vet Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a successful developer with a new bride and baby, popular and prominent in his community.  Then, the sunny prosperity of the postwar boom – and Frank Enley’s life – is shattered by the arrival of Joe Parker (Robert Ryan), a guy with a trench coat, a limp and an obsession. Parker’s limp is only the physical manifestation of a psychological wound from the war. While in the same Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank took an action that Parker believes cost the lives of their buddies. Parker has come to town to kill Frank as retribution.

In the extremity of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank was faced by a situation with no good choices; he knows (correctly) that few in 1949 America will be able to see his action in that context. Because he would instantly lose his standing in the community, he can’t call the police. Now Frank is plunged into both the terror of being killed and self-loathing because he thinks he deserves it,

Frank flees in a panic, going underground in Bunker Hill, a far cry from Frank’s bright, well-tended suburb. Dazed by the position he finds himself in, Frank tries drinking, but there isn’t enough booze in LA to quell his terror. He encounters the world-weary prostitute Pat (Mary Astor), who hides him in her apartment while she figures out how to bleed some money from him; she connects him with a couple predatory bottom-feeders (Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes) who may be more heartless and lethal than Joe. All the time, Joe Parker is closing in, right up to the unpredictable climax.

There’s no question that Ryan’s Joe Parker is the villain here, but you can make the case that it’s Frank Enley who committed the unforgiveable and that Joe is the avenging angel, here to deliver justice.

Remarkably versatile for a leading man, Van Heflin was so good in war movies (Battle Cry) and westerns (Shane, 3:10 to Yuma) and corporate drama (Patterns). He may have been his best in classic film noir (Johnny Eager, The Kid Glove Killer, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Possessed, The Prowler and East Side, West Side) and the neo-noir Once a Thief. Underrated in his lifetime and overlooked today, Heflin was naturally relatable (but very scary in The Prowler and Once a Thief). Topped by his staircase scene with Janet Leigh and his wild stumble to Pat’s apartment, Heflin captures all of Frank’s stunned desperation and self loathing despair; in my book, Heflin never surpassed his performance in Act of Violence.

Mary Astor in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Mary Astor was one of the very most beautiful humans as a teenager, and was 35 when she played the alluring Brigid O’Shaughnnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Astor was 42 when she made Act of Violence, and she looked the part Pat, with all of the mileage on her, without any vanity, . Capturing all of Pat’s exhaustion, cynicism and ambivalence, Act of Violence rates with The Maltese Falcon as Astor’s finest performance.

Pat’s sordid apartment and the grimy joint where she drinks and picks up customers seem so much farther from Frank’s well-trimmed suburb than the actual distance of a few miles. It’s a milieu that has worn out Pat, and she knows it; she’s about to move and try another town.

Pat’s sense of morality is flexible. What she does for a living is illegal although it’s a victimless crime. She tries to milk as much money out of each man she meets. But she has her limits; she’s ok with bleeding some money from a rich guy like Frank, but, while she might tolerate fraud or blackmail, she won’t countenance murder.

Ryan’s single-minded, relentless and cruel Joe Parker would be the best thing in most movies, but the performances by Heflin and Astor are for the ages. Ryan is off-screen for the most chilling moment in the film, when Pat, holding the telephone receiver, relays Joe’s reaction to Frank’s buyoff offer.

Van Heflin and Janet Leigh in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Frank’s wife is played by a 21-year-old Janet Leigh, in only her second year of screen acting. Leigh is excellent as a fresh-faced, naive young woman who could never have imagined the situation she faces now.

Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes really elevate Act of Violence with their supporting turns. Kroeger’s shark-like grin is very scary, and Holmes is an even more venal lawyer (disbarred this time) than the one he played in Kiss of Death.

Van Heflin, Mary Astor and Barry Kroeger in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Act of Violence came early in the career of director Fred Zinnemann, who had debuted impressively with The Kid Glove Killer and was only four years away from his masterpiece, High Noon. As an A-lister, he went on to direct iconic films like From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma! and A Man for All Seasons, garnering seven Best Director Oscar nominations and winning for The Sundowners. Another thriller, The Day of the Jackal, is my personal favorite Zinnemann film.

Cinematographer Robert Surtees’ remarkably varied body of work included Oklahoma!, Ben-Hur, PT 109, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Collector, The Graduate and The Last Picture Show. Surtees was not known as a noir DP, but he brought out all the obsession, desperation and shabbiness of this story. No one ever lit and photographed Bunker Hill any better.

Van Heflin in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Robert L. Richards (Winchester ’73) adapted the screenplay from a story by Collier Young.

Remember, you can’t stream Act of Violence, so make sure to DVR it this Friday on Turner Class Movies. 

Van Heflin in ACT OF VIOLENCE

BLITZ: one brave, resourceful kid amid the horrors

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Photo caption: Saiorse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in BLITZ. Courtesy of AppleTV.

In the WW II drama Blitz, Rita (Saiorse Ronan) is a single mom who, like all Londoners, must endure The Blitz, the 8-month German terror bombing of civilian London. Over a million English city-dwellers were evacuated to the countryside, and half of them were children. Rita’s own nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) is set to be sent to safety while she remains at her job in a munitions factory.

This plan angers George, and he bolts, running amok through London. His adventures, and Rita’s terrified search for him when she finds him missing, make up the core of Blitz. It is a child-in-peril story, but not one where the adult protagonist rescues the child. Rita may be played by a big movie star, but this is George’s story and a portrait of his determination and resourcefulness.

George is multi-racial, which is hard to be in 1940 England, where he looks different that just about everyone else. As he runs a gauntlet of racist attitudes, it’s a huge relief whenever George encounters someone with even minimal kindness.

Elliott Heffernan in BLITZ. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Writer-director Steve McQueen’s biggest achievement in Blitz is to tell this story so compellingly from the child’s point of view. Sometimes George isn’t scared when he should be, and sometimes he is overwhelmed by a situation any adult could handle. McQueen certainly found the right actor to play George in Heffernan, who captures George’s vulnerabilities as well as his underlying reservoir of tenacity.

McQueen also pulls off a well-paced thriller and makes the audience feel the historical context. We’ve all seen depictions of The Blitz with the air raid sirens, blackout wardens and plucky Brits sheltering in the Underground and emerging to see the rubble, carnage and fire. But not like this. McQueen’s Blitz is vivid, uncomfortable and terrifying.

There is a spectacular scene at a ritzy hotel’s nightclub, complete with a Cab Calloway-like band and an extra-long tracking shot through the kitchen, an homage to Martin Scorsese’s famous Copacabana shot in Goodfellas. I understand that McQueen would argue that this scene sets up a brief moment later in the film, but it really isn’t necessary and McQueen is just showing off his skills (and AppleTV’s budget). It’s fun, though.

What McQueen fails to deliver, though, is multi-dimensional characters (with the exception of George). Pretty much every non-George character is just one thing – officious, bigoted, evil or saintly.

The is, however, more than a glimmer of texture in a performance by one of my favorite actors, Stephen Graham, who often plays a troubled cop or a criminal psycho in British crime shows like Line of Duty and Little Boy Blue. Graham has a small role as a depraved gang leader, and he makes the character despicable and unhinged and scary and damaged. Graham has worked in US films, too, as an Italian-American mobster in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Scrum in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire and Baby Face Nelson in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

Blitz is a fine adventure yarn, evocative history and a visually impressive film. Blitz is now streaming on AppleTV.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST: next door to the unthinkable

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Photo caption: Sandra Huller in THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Courtesy of A24.

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an exceptionally original and well made, intentionally unsettling and, ultimately, unnecessary film.

We first meet Hedwig (the great Sandra Huller), Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and their five children in 1943 on an idyllic riverside picnic in the woods.  They return to their spacious villa and put the kids to bed (Hedwig firmly and Rudolph gently).  When Hedwig and Rudolph are in bed themselves, they ignore what sounds like shouting and the barking of guard dogs nearby.  

The next morning we see that Rudolph is the commandant of Auschwitz and the family home is LITERALLY next door to the walls.  Hedwig, like any hausfrau, hangs laundered sheets to dry, while her groceries are delivered by death camp slave labor. 

As the family’s domestic life goes on, the soundtrack slowly becomes louder and includes more shots, screams and the drone of industrial extermination.  We see more of the skyline, with smokestacks spewing fire and ash.

Glazer slips in little matter-of-fact horrors like perverse Easter Eggs. Hedwig brags to her gal pals about furs and other luxuries she has stolen from dead Jews. Hedwig seems meaner than Rudolph and coldly utters what must be the most terrifying threat ever made to a maid.

Having married a guy who has risen to be a big boss, Hedwig is living her best life, with servants and plenty of perks, like Italian spa vacations.  She has the very disturbing capacity to shut out the hellish enterprise over her back fence, replete with the sounds, smells and images of workaday genocide. Glazer has made a Holocaust film without any images from inside the death camp; the Holocaust is just kind of leaking over the fence.

The Martin Amis novel that Glazer adapted into the screenplay did not name the commandant and his wife, but Glazer uses the names of the actual historical figures: the real Rudolph and Hedwig Hoss.  When one reads about the real Hoss, you can see the care with which Glazer depicts him, down to his distinctive haircut, the kids’ names and Hedwig’s dream of spacious gardens (She’s the true believer in lebensraum.)

Rudolph is not a hate-spewing frothing maniac, more of a Company Man go-getter.  One can imagine a 1960s version of Rudolph driving to surpass this quarter’s IBM sales goal. Yet, this is the man who admitted to murdering 2.5 million people; the other million, he said, died of disease and starvation.

The Zone of Interest is an extraordinary illustration of the banality of evil. But why do we need it?  Hannah Arendt’s recognition that Hitler’s mad horrors were not carried out by monsters, but by the ordinary and mediocre, has been generally accepted for decades. If Hitler were obsessed with dairy production or ceramic art, thousands of workaday Nazis would have been content to do just that, instead.  The logical conclusion is that the Holocaust doesn’t need a maniac to happen again, just millions of people who obey the maniac. After all, it was ordinary-looking American companies that vied for Trump Administration contracts to put migrant babies in cages, not some survivalist militia.

It’s a familiar truism, and, to my sensibilities, not worth the unpleasantness of sitting watching these unpleasant people and their unthinkable deeds. That being said, this is anything but a slog. The Zone of Interest is captivating throughout (not unlike a vehicular crash).

This is only Glazer’s fourth feature in 24 years: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), Under the Skin (2013).

The Zone of Interest has been nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture.

WIFE OF A SPY: espionage non-thriller

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Photo caption: Yû Aoi and Issey Takahashi in WIFE OF A SPY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

In the espionage non-thriller Wife of a Spy, the prosperous Yusaku (Issey Takahashi) runs a business in international commerce. That is increasingly uncomfortable in 1940 Japan, where the militaristic government is whipping up xenophobia and bullying those Japanese who interact with foreigners.

Yusaku is a smooth cosmopolitan who won’t be intimidated. He keeps on the road, even to dangerous hotspots like Manchuria. That’s not okay with his loving, apparently frivolous wife Santoko (Yû Aoi), who, frustrated by his absences, is getting increasingly suspicious about what he’s really up to.

She finally stumbles upon his secret – he and his nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) are outraged by the war crimes of the military government and are engaged in a secret plot to undermine it. Santoko, who was been a mere adornment, becomes herself embroiled.

Regrettably, Wife of a Spy is more of a snoozer than a thriller. It just takes director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) too long to get through the first and second acts.

Worse, I found the sudden dramatic lurches in the performances by Yû Aoi and Ryôta Bandô very off-putting. I don’t think I missed something cultural because I’ve watched a lot of Japanese cinema, and haven’t seen anything like this before. It’s like the director of a high school play says, “Now throw yourself on the floor!” Yû Aoi is a popular and lauded actress who has five nominations and two wins in the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars. I’m blaming Kurosawa.

I’m also mostly alone in my opinion. Wife of a Spy enjoys a high score of 79 on Metacritic and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Wife of a Spy’s advocates may be seduced by the film’s undeniable beauty. The cinematography by Tatsunosuke Sasaki, production design by Norifumi Ataka and the costumes by Haruki Koketsu are exquisite.

Here’s a novel aspect to Wife of a Spy. The hero is a traitor to his nation. Yusaku loves Japan, hates the Japanese government, and believes Japan will be better off the sooner that Japan loses the war. So, he is trying to hasten the defeat of his own nation’s military, which is the definition of traitorous. I haven’t heard that this was hugely controversial in today’s Japan.

Wife of a Spy is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and KinoNow and is included on MHz.

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.

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.

ASHES AND DIAMONDS: a killer wants to stop

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Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Coming up tomorrow night 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.

TCM will be preceding Ashes and Diamonds with the documentary Wadja by Wadja, which I haven’t seen, but I will be recording. Ashes and Diamonds can be streamed from Amazon and iTunes. It was featured at the 2020 Noir City film festival.

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: why couldn’t this have been a good movie?

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Paul Rudd in THE CATCHER WAS A SPY

The fact that Moe Berg’s is the only baseball card displayed at CIA headquarters tells us that he was a candidate for The Most Interesting Man in the World. Berg was a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law who played 15 years in the Major Leagues, one of the few Jews in pre-war baseball.  While a pro player in the early 1930s, he visited Japan twice, learned Japanese and surreptitiously photographed Tokyo for US intelligence. During World War II, he performed secret missions in Europe for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

That’s quite a life. Unfortunately, The Catcher Was a Spy drains the interest out of it by trying to portray that most cerebral of real-life characters, Moe Berg, in kind of an actiony movie. The climax is a will-he-or-won’t-he decision that Berg has to make on a secret mission. If you are still awake by then…

Most of The Catcher Was a Spy is Paul Rudd as Moe Berg being watchful. Berg was an enigma and notoriously closed-mouthed – so we see him being enigmatic and silent. Not very cinematic.

The cast is remarkably talented: Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce and Paul Giamatti, Connie Nielson, and Shea Whigham. Strong has a pivotal role, but we only glimpse the others, and I still can’t place who Connie Nielsen played; it must have been that other female character…

If you’re a history geek like me, you might stream this. But don’t expect an espionage thriller.