Director John Ford at 125

John Ford

I’ve loved movies from as far back as I can remember, and my favorites growing up were filled with action and adventure.  When as a young adult I finally began paying attention to directors, I discovered that many of the films I admired most were made by John Ford.  Today is his 125^th birthday.

Ford was a prolific director, even by the higher-output standards of his time, and he had astonishing breadth in subject matter.  He won four Academy Awards for Best Director, more than anyone else.  But although those four films were all non-westerns, Ford is best known today for his magnificent Westerns.  

Harry Carey Sr, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Henry Fonda (in his early days), and especially John Wayne, whom Ford made a star in his 1939 film Stagecoach, are just some of the actors particularly associated with Ford.  In fact, he cast in supporting roles a large group of regulars that became known as the Ford Stock Company.

Ford was admired for his genius, both in narrative and in technique.  But he was a gruff, often-unpleasant man, and at times mean and vindictive – especially when drunk.  Given his personality, Ford had a poor and unsatisfying family life, but in his films he seems almost obsessed with the rituals of community and domestic life.  Many of his best films center on family – some of his earlier ones, like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, can seem overly-sentimental and mannered today, but some that came later are personal favorites – The Quiet Man and Donovan’s Reef.  Other non-Westerns that I particularly enjoy include What Price Glory, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Last Hurrah.

Ford's Westerns stand out, many of them filmed in Monument Valley (which he put on the map).  Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are particularly noteworthy favorites.  And then there’s his masterpiece, The Searchers, which many film buffs consider perhaps the greatest Western and one of the best films ever made. 

There are certainly other directors who have made many great films; for me Billy Wilder particularly stands out in this regard.  But Ford had an extra dimension, a thread, in his films that is hard to identify or describe, but it’s there.  Once, as the story goes, Orson Welles, certainly no slouch himself as a filmmaker, was asked to name the directors he most admired, and he replied: "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

R Balsamo  

The Lufthansa Heist at 40

Today is the 40th anniversary of the incredibly-successful, infamous Lufthansa heist by New York City mobsters.  It paradoxically led, through greed and stupidity, to the destruction of many, if not most, of the men who pulled it off.  Moral of the story — be careful what you wish for.  Martin Scorsese, though, got a great movie out of it, Goodfellas, and he may be one of the few who really profited from it all.

R Balsamo

Dropping in on Bang the Drum Slowly

This 1973 film tells the bittersweet story of a star major league baseball pitcher who protects and supports his less-talented and simple-minded friend and teammate who just learns he is dying from Hodgkin’s disease.  The title comes from a phrase in the song Streets of Laredo, a story about a dying young cowboy, and the haunting tune is a backdrop in the film.  Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro, unknowns at the time, give strong, understated performances, and Vincent Gardenia almost steals the show as the comically-frustrated manager who tries to find out the secret he knows the two men are hiding.  I enjoyed watching the film once again after so many years, getting absorbed in its slow rhythms, soft humor, and poignant moments.  In the movie world, this is one of those little gems that get lost in the glare from the big chunks of fool’s gold.

R Balsamo

At the Jesuit Church in Palermo One Day

The Jesuit Church in Palermo, Sicily

When in Sicily last month we sought out the Jesuit church in Palermo, the Chiesa del Gesu.  We discovered a magnificent space, filled with figures and patterns of stunning craftsmanship carved in white marble.  It is perhaps the most ornately decorated church I have ever seen. 

Inside a wedding was taking place.  From the back we could see the ceremony way up front in the distance.  There was movement and talking.  The priest spoke, in Italian of course.  Then a woman rose and began singing, in a clear, strong voice.  The melody jarred me for a moment, as I recognized it as the hauntingly beautiful wordless vocals used as a leitmotif for the character Jill, the prostitute yearning for a better life, in Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (long one of my favorites).  The composer was the great Ennio Morricone.

The melody is first heard as Jill arrives in a very unfamiliar place to attend her wedding reception and start a new life.  As beautiful as the music is, it is sad and melancholic, the most penetrating Morricone melody I have heard.  There's a wistfulness as well, all befitting the emotional state of the character Jill, played by the Sicilian actress Claudia Cardinale.   The film is a story of vengeful justice and the banality of evil, all played out in a most violent way in the old American West.  And Jill is caught in the middle of it all.  But she is a remarkably strong and resilient woman amidst great tragedies and dangers.  

So there it was, in a remarkable church on a sunny April afternoon in ancient Palermo, Jill's Theme, sung strong and clear echoing though the ornate, very Italian space.  A curious choice, perhaps, but certainly a perceptive and assertive one ... befitting no doubt a strong woman, like Jill, arriving to start a new married life.

R Balsamo

Here is a montage of scenes with Claudia Cardinale from Once Upon a Time in the West, with voice-over vocals of Jill's Theme by Patricia Janeckova.

Remembering Edward Everett Horton

Has there ever been anyone funnier in film than Edward Everett Horton?   I first met him, or met his voice that is, early on – he was the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales series that was a regular part of the animated Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  Growing older I’ve come to enjoy his every film appearance.  He excelled in playing cheerful though slightly befuddled and often exasperated characters and was a master of the delayed double-take.  Three favorites:  Holiday, Springtime in the Rockies, and Arsenic and Old Lace.

Then there are his Astaire/Rogers pictures, three of the best, in which he practically steals every scene he’s in:  The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, and Shall We Dance.  His scenes with the daffy, screwball Alice Brady in The Gay Divorcee are alone worth the price of admission, and as a bonus he has the Let's K-nock K-nees dance number with Betty Grable no less.  The Gay Divorcee, incidentally, features the then new song The Continental in a 20-minute song and dance extravaganza (here's a part); it later won the very first Academy Award for best original song, back in the good old days when such awards were merit-based.  His scenes (link; link) with Eric Blore are priceless.

Per Wikipedia, the New York Times, and other sources, Horton was born one hundred thirty years ago today in Brooklyn to parents of Scottish extraction.  Horton’s grandfather was writer Edward Everett Hale, who was a nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and a grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the martyred spy of the American Revolution.  He attended college for a while at Oberlin, until, showing an early theatrical bent, he was “asked to leave” after climbing to the top of a building, and after gathering a crowd below, threw off a dummy the audience mistook for him.  He moved back to New York City, attended Columbia University for a time, and began his performing career in acting and singing.

He started in silent pictures in 1918, and from then on was based on the West Coast.  His first talkie was the 1931 version of The Front Page.  He was an entrepreneur as well – he would lease a theater and produce a play in which he would star; in 1932 he leased the Hollywood Playhouse for a year and put on Springtime for Henry, in which over his lifetime he would appear more than 3,000 times.  From all this he earned enough to spring for a summer home on Lake George in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

After finding success in Hollywood, he bought 23 acres of land in the Encino section of Los Angeles and established a compound of houses where he, his mother, his sister, and his brother lived with their families.  He was an avid antique collector, acquiring a valuable collection over the years.  Horton died in Encino in 1970 at the age of 84 and is buried in Forest Lawn, the cemetery of the stars.  His work, fortunately for us, lives on.

R Balsamo

Veterans on Film

Today is Veterans' Day, and it seems worthwhile to list some of my favorite film portrayals of the valor and sacrifices and successes of American servicemen.

American Sniper – the story of brave and dedicated American soldiers fighting against vicious, fanatical, nihilistic Islamist warriors during the Iraq War.

Tears of the Sun – a team of Navy Seals undertakes a dangerous goodwill rescue mission in Africa.

We Were Soldiers – the harrowing account of one of the early battles in the American Vietnam War.

Go Tell the Spartans – Bert Lancaster leads a small force holding out against the Viet Cong.

Platoon – American soldiers fight to survive in Vietnam.

Pork Chop Hill – A brave American unit fighting the Chinese communists in the Korean War.

Band of Brothers – The masterpiece 11-hour treatment of the Stephen Ambrose book about a unit of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, in the European Theater of WW2, made pre-911 by Spielberg before he later devolved into the anti-American moral equivalency state-of-mind.  

A Bridge Too Far – Epic treatment of the Allies' failed Operation Market Garden initiative in 1944 Europe, aimed at penetrating into Germany itself.  

The Bridge at Remagen – War-weary American soldiers fight toward the Rhine River in early 1945 and ultimately capture the last remaining bridge into Germany.

Saving Private Ryan – The story of a special mission behind German lines in northern France in the days immediately after D-Day.

The Big Red One – The story of a squad of the 1st Infantry Division as it fights across North Africa, Sicily, and France in WW2.

The Battle of the Bulge – Epic adaptation of the American resilience in the face of the German Army's last gasp in the West during WW2.

Miracle at St. Anna – The story of four black American soldiers caught behind German lines in northern Italy late in WW2 fighting to keep themselves and local villagers alive, a story not over until it explodes into a modern murder mystery.

Fury – A recent film about an American tank crew late in WW2, very good until its unrealistic and contrived grand finale shootout.

Sahara – An isolated motley group of Allied soldiers with a single Sherman tank led by Bogart battle thirst, heat, and the Germans in the North African desert during WW2.

The Enemy Below – An American destroyer chases a crafty German submarine in the North Atlantic in WW2.

U-571 – An American submarine crew fights to save themselves, the German submarine they captured and are stuck in, and a secret decoding machine in the North Atlantic in WW2.  

Memphis Belle – A B-17 crew's harrowing bombing missions over Germany.

The Bridge On the River Kwai – A lone cynical American serviceman witnesses the descent into madness and treason by British officers in a Japanese prison camp, escapes, and reluctantly returns to set things right.

Midway – The story of the great naval air battle six months after Pearl Harbor that spelled the beginning of the drawn-out end of the Japanese navy in WW2.  

Objective Burma – American soldiers create havoc behind Japanese lines in Burma.

The Pacific – The Spielberg-Hanks treatment of Americans in the Pacific Theater in WW2, that remains compelling viewing despite its lapses at times into the Anti-American moral equivalency point of view.

The Great Raid – Army Rangers on a mission to rescue American prisoners in a brutal Japanese POW camp in the Philippines late in the War.

The Lost Battalion – A outnumbered group of American soldiers trapped behind enemy lines fights off waves of German soldiers in the closing days of WW1.

What Price Glory – Ford directs Cagney and Dailey, not to mention Corrine Calvet, in a rousing story of an American infantry unit on the Western Front in WW1.

Gettysburg – The superbly told story of the greatest battle of the American Civil War.  The portrayal of the heroic 20th Maine and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at Little Round Top is special.

Remembering Omar Sharif

He was given one of the most dramatic entrances for an actor in film, cast as a then-unknown by director David Lean in his masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia.  Starting as a shimmering dot in the distant desert, his figure grew slowly larger until he burst into the scene by suddenly shooting Lawrence’s companion and guide. 

According to Wikipedia, Omar Sharif was born Michel Demitri Chalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Lebanese Christian family.  The city in his youth was a "chaotically cosmopolitan" place (link) in a country ruled by the Westernized King Farouk, who was a friend of his mother and played bridge at their house.  He graduated from Cairo University with a degree in mathematics and physics, but eventually gravitated to acting.  In his early 20s he converted to Islam and scrapped his Christian name in order to marry an Egyptian actress, back when Muslim countries had actresses.  In 1962 Lean cast the 32 year old actor in his first English-speaking role in Lawrence.     

Smart and educated, a noted bridge player and a speaker of many languages, Omar Sharif died a few days ago in Cairo at the age of 83.     

To a generation of middle-aged American women, he came to epitomize the somewhat exotic, always mysterious, ever debonair foreign sex symbol.  His film roles included The Night of the Generals, a favorite of mine in which he plays a German army officer conducting a murder investigation during WWII; the picture also features his co-star from Lawrence, Peter O’Toole.  Perhaps his greatest part was that of a sensitive and altruistic physician and poet consumed by the barbarity of the Russian Revolution in another David Lean epic masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago.

I imagine it would be hard for someone young today to appreciate the breath of his appeal.  But there is this.  In the rolling hills of southwest Wisconsin, far from the plains of the Nile delta or the forests of Lebanon, nestled along the high, picturesque dalles of the Wisconsin River is a little town called Wisconsin Dells.  It has become a resort area hosting the thousands of tourists attracted to the cool water and beautiful north woods countryside.  In the heart of the sprawl is a supper club called Wally’s House of Embers, there since the late 1950s.  For that special occasion it has a cozy, overly-decorated, very private booth for two.  Anyone wanting to reserve it for a romantic dinner by candlelight needs just to ask for the Omar Sharif Room.

R Balsamo

Remembering Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies

The Name's Reilly, Sidney Reilly

On this day in 1925, 88 years ago, Sidney Reilly, adventurer, con-man, and British agent, the model for Fleming’s James Bond, was supposedly executed by the Soviets after being lured to Russia in a trap.  I say supposedly because much of Reilly’s story is shrouded in uncertainty, as he fabricated stories and identities as a matter of course.  

Perhaps the first true international man of mystery, it seems most likely that he was born in Czarist Russia to Jewish parents and found his way to Britain where he married a wealthy woman, freshly widowed perhaps during an affair with Reilly, and became a valued operative for the young British Secret Service.  His undercover exploits were all over the globe, including his foiling the Russians in Manchuria just before the Russo-Japanese war, stealing weapon plans from Germany before WWI, and causing much mischief in Russia for the Bolsheviks.    

Sam Neill as Sidney Reilly

I first learned of Reilly from the excellent 1983 TV mini-series Reilly: Ace of Spies, which was based the book of the same name, which I later read, by Robert Bruce Lockhart.  The music theme was a haunting melody I enjoyed so much that I recorded it from the TV speaker onto a cassette tape; I only knew it was "The Romance" movement from a Dmitri Shostakovich score for a movie called The Gadfly.  What I didn’t know until today, knocking about on Wikipedia as I am wont to do, is that this film was an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by an Irish woman named Ethel Voynich, allegedly once a lover of Reilly’s, whose theme is revolution and romance and whose central character is allegedly based on none other than Reilly himself.    

Lockhart was a friend and colleague of Sidney Reilly.  He later worked closely in British intelligence with Ian Fleming, and Reilly undoubtedly came up in conversation.  According to the Wikipedia entry (link), “Reilly was multi-lingual, fascinated by the Far East, fond of fine living, and a compulsive gambler” – just like some other secret agent we know.

R Balsamo

Remembering Burt Lancaster, at 100

Today would have been the 100^th birthday of actor Burt Lancaster, one of the greats of Hollywood and a particular favorite of mine.  As a boy I especially liked adventure stories, and Lancaster’s The Crimson Pirate is one of the first I can remember seeing; I was particularly enthralled by the daring and ingenious escape in which he and two others, while chained together in a small dinghy, capsize their boat to trap air in its hull, sink to the bottom, and walk the whole way back to shore on the sea floor breathing the trapped air.  That movie was in the repertory of the weekly Family Classics movie series on WGN TV in Chicago along with another film of his – Jim Thorpe – All-American.  

Although born and raised in East Harlem in New York City, Lancaster started out as a circus performer, and his gracefulness of motion is evident in his work.  He had a warm, confident persona accompanied by an easy, almost trademarked, wide, toothy smile and an expressive physicality.  In his long career drama was his strength.  He won an Academy Award for his role in Elmer Gantry, a film which showcases his charm and talent as well as any other and which won an Oscar for co-star Shirley Jones as well.  Some of his other well-known performances were in The Bird Man of Alcatraz and Atlantic City.  He starred alongside some remarkable leading ladies, such as Katherine Hepburn in The Rainmaker, Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven, and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.  He also started a production company that, among other things, produced the award-winning movie Marty as well as Sweet Smell of Success, in which he starred as the heavy.

Particular favorites of mine include war pictures The Train, Go Tell the Spartans, Castle Keep, and Run Silent, Run Deep, and Westerns Ulzana’s Raid, The Professionals, and Lawman.  He had notable performances all the way to the end of his career, and his late roles in Rocket Gibraltar and Field of Dreams constitute a memorable finish to a remarkable body of work.  Lancaster died in 1994 at the age of 80.

Avanti! Redux

While flipping through TV channels late one recent evening I came across a Billy Wilder film I had never seen.  Being a fan of many of his pictures, particularly One, Two, Three (the subject of an early post on this blog), Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, and the lesser known Kiss Me Stupid, I took a flyer.  Glad I did.  I only saw part of the movie the first time through, though, joining somewhere in progress, but that didn’t bother me.  When I was growing up, my father would take my brother and me to the movies some Sunday afternoons, and we would get to the theater whenever we got there and join the movie in progress, then later sit through the beginning and leave at the point we came in.  Arriving at the theater before the beginning of a picture came to me later.  Fortunately this time, I was able to record a later showing of the film and watch it from the beginning a few days later.   

Avanti! is a romantic comedy, and something a bit more.  It tells the bittersweet story of an American (Jack Lemmon) and a Brit (Juliet Mills) who independently journey to Ischia in the Bay of Naples, he to retrieve the body of his father and she that of her mother, both of whom just died together in an automobile crash.  Lemmon discovers to his chagrin that the two elders had been having a surreptitious one-month summer affair for 10 years.  The movie becomes an understated story of the beginning of a second generation affair between two unlikely people who start out at odds, but where soon enough the gruff exterior of the harried American businessman softens in the face of the charm of Ms Mills’s character and of the Italian setting (Italy isn’t a country, it’s an emotion, says Ms Mills).  Remarkably, Avanti! isn’t very well known today, and isn’t shown much on cable TV (as a veteran channel-flipper, I know), but on release in 1972 it received 6 Golden Globe nominations, and one win (Lemmon).  

The movie reminds me of a late-career, very personal, and similarly undeservedly underappreciated picture by another favorite director of mine – John Ford’s Donovan’s Reef.  Like that one, this one is full of the director’s many special touches – comedy, sentimentality, satire.  Mills’s riff on not being taken for granted while she enthusiastically unpacks her clothes in Lemmon’s room is hilarious, the hotel manager is superb, the medicinal mud baths promise an older diplomat the acidity of a man of 20, and it’s delightful to discover how well-stocked the ristorante is with the many varieties of pasta.  There’s plenty of the sardonic humor for which writers Wilder and Diamond are known – an impatient, overbearing American diplomat is approaching the small island in a helicopter and asks the pilot “Are you sure this is Ischia, because I do not want to land in Africa?”, from whom comes the reply “That would be bigger”.  Subtle comedic touches abound -- the movement of the door handle at a moment of Sicilian passion, the pop of a wine bottle at dinner, a reflexive fascist salute, soaking fingernails in a sugar bowl.  The beautiful score consists mostly of well-chosen established Italian tunes – Un’ Ora Sola Ti Vorrei, A Tazza E’ Café, and Senza Fine particularly set the moods and pace.  At its core, this is the story of an awakening, a passing through a doorway to a fuller life – Permesso?  Avanti!

R Balsamo

Heaven's Gate Once Again

Lately I’ve been watching the “director’s cut” of the movie Heaven’s Gate, the 1980 epic that supposedly bankrupted a studio and effectively ended the career of director Michael Cimino.  I saw at a theater the original release of a truncated version, which bombed on debut.  The longer cut is a much better film that perhaps deserves more appreciation.

The film has two story lines:  the larger is the conflict between powerful Wyoming cattle ranchers and the poor Eastern European immigrants who are spilling onto grazing land, and the smaller is the love triangle involving a brothel madam (Isabelle Huppert) and her two lovers, the local lawman named Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and the enforcer for the cattlemen named Champion (Christopher Walken). 

The film’s structure is in three parts:  a main narrative set over a short period of time in Wyoming bookended by a long 20 minute prologue of the Harvard class of 1870’s graduation ceremonies and a short epilogue set back east in Newport.  The main character is Averill, one of the Harvard graduates who years later is the county lawman duty-bound to protect the immigrants but who seems at times wearily resigned to the inevitability of their oppression by the powerful and violence-prone ranchers.  Billy (John Hurt), classmate and friend of Averill, speaks at the graduation ceremony and concludes that society is “well arranged”, contravening the main graduation speaker who encouraged the men to make the world a better place.  Twenty years later they both are out West, where society is definitely not “well arranged”, although Averill is trying to make it more so. 

The film has problems, to be sure.  The uneven narrative meanders, lingering here and there with poignant “slice of life” segments such as a rousing roller skating scene and the graduation segment.  Poor sound quality and mumbled dialog (this could almost be an Altman movie) makes the narrative frustratingly hard to decipher in places.  Nevertheless, the movie is captivating, surprisingly so since the plot in many ways is so mundane.  It’s beautifully filmed in many parts, especially those showing the hardscrabble lives of the immigrant poor, their perseverance and resilience in the face of great hardship, and their exuberance and emotionalism as well.  Perhaps the movie works best as a collection of slice-of-life portraits, which somehow taken together amount to more than the whole.

“Heaven’s Gate”, incidentally, is the name of the roller skating rink in the immigrant-dominated town of Sweetwater which proudly proclaims in writing to offer a “moral and exhilarating experience”.  The film reminds me of another revisionist Western with a story similarly of growing intensity, explosive violence, and haunting music -- Sergio Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, which itself incorporated many references to earlier Westerns and whose story revolves around a railroad baron’s ruthless ways that eventually lead to his ruin at a crucial piece of land named, perhaps only coincidentally, Sweetwater.

R Balsamo

At the Movies = “Act of Valor” Hits All Targets

I saw the new movie Act of Valor and found it quite engrossing and engaging.  It tells the fictional story of a team of US Navy Seals in action at various points around the globe working to hunt down a group of terrorists, and reportedly uses real Seals to play those roles instead of actors (and most are pretty good).  The lasting impression to the viewer is the seriousness, dedication, skill, and selflessness with which these incredible men protect their countrymen.

The movie is well-paced with lots of action, and, given the current anti-American, Islamist-apologetic mindset predominant in Hollywood today, remarkably the bad guys are real-life bad guys (i.e., terrorists) and the good guys are real-life good guys (e.g., Navy Seals and the US government); notably, the good guys are not sympathetically-portrayed homicidal Islamists or third-worlders with grievances, and the bad guys are not higher ups in the US government (in a Republican administration, of course).  How original, how novel – and in a very entertaining movie to boot!              

John M Greco

Jack Wallace, Actor

This evening I saw a commercial on TV, for Direct TV I think, which had as a background prop an elderly silent man in a wheelchair that I believe is the actor Jack Wallace, who started out in Chicago. Very glad to see him still acting. I first and last saw him live in Chicago around 1971 at the old 11th Street Theater, just off Michigan Avenue, playing the role of McMurphy in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m pretty sure W.H. Macy was also in that cast [corrected by a comment below]. I went with and at the instigation of my friend John Killacky, who later moved off to New York City and places beyond in the arts and arts management.

Wallace was terrific. I thought I would see much more of him, but that was not to be. I remember he had a small role, along with some other Chicago actors, in the Steven Segal Film Above the Law, which was set in and shot in Chicago. The Internet Movie Database shows that Wallace has been in many TV shows and movies (link), and I’m glad for him for that; it has just one photo of him, though -- as part of a cast group picture from the movie Boogie Nights. A great performance in Cuckoo’s Nest I still remember, these many years later.

(The nearby image I pulled off a Google search.)
Richard Balsamo

Another Hollywood Liberal, This Time Tom Hanks, Runs Off the Rails

Tom Hanks, in a recent Time Magazine interview (link) promoting his new miniseries about the fighting in the Pacific theater of WWII titled “The Pacific,” said the following:

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?"

Amazing. Yet another example of the self-loathing mindset of some Western liberals, who see the glass of Western culture and history 1/5 empty rather than 4/5 full. Through Hanks we see the liberal dogma of the evil in Western culture and white guilt over past racism, real, exaggerated, or imagined.

Hanks is breathtakingly ignorant of history. He sees racism as a significant part of the American spirit during the war, but ignores how we fought beside and in defense of many East Asians, including, to name only a few, Chinese, Polynesians, Filipinos, and Burmese. How could it possibly be that our motivation to fight the Japanese was based on racism against East Asians? He also ignores or is grossly ignorant of our massive, expensive, and successful effort to rebuild Japan after the war. We rehabilitated the Japanese at great expense even though we wanted to “annihilate” them because they were “‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods”? This is astoundingly incoherent and without historical foundation.

Then, to compound his felony, he projects that same imagined racism on our current war against radical Islamists, implying Americans are fighting this war out of racism toward Muslims, showing more ignorance of many things, not the least of which we fought in the Balkans not long ago to protect Muslims against European Christians.

John Hinderaker of Powerline Blog asks “Does Hollywood Make You Stupid?” (link).

Historian Victor Davis Hanson, in a post at Pajamas Media titled “Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?” (link), writes:

… Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus. Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous….

Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a “they…us” 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to “kill” us, while we in turn wanted to “annihilate” them…. In short Hanks’s comments are as ahistorical as they are unhinged .…

The interview in Time is by liberal historian Douglas Brinkley and carries the astounding and risible title of “How Tom Hanks Became America's Historian in Chief.” The Hollywood liberals and their media jock-strap sniffers just won’t stop denigrating the United States.

John M Greco

Related Post:
“The Pacific” Premiers – In the First Hour, American Racism & Torture, and Moral Equivalency

“The Pacific” Premiers – In the First Hour, American Racism & Torture, and Moral Equivalency

The first episode of the Hanks/Spielberg Miniseries “The Pacific” aired last night. Oh boy.

Responsible for two pre-9/11 extremely well-done war stories set in the European Theater of WWII – “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers,” the duo returns with an ambitious drama about a group of Marines in the Pacific Theater.

After the obligatory home front background vignettes, the action starts at Guadalcanal, with the story centered on a thoughtful new Marine who wants to be a writer and who had a very cold send off from his father. We hear many racist references to the Japanese uttered by a number of different guys. We see the Americans isolate a Japanese soldier in a shallow stream and torture him with non-fatal rifle shots until the Thoughtful Marine compassionately shoots him dead, thereby establishing him as the Moral One (in contrast to many of his fellow Marines). We see this Thoughtful, Moral Marine find and reflect over some possessions in a dead Japanese soldier’s bag -- a picture of that soldier and a young woman, a small figure (? a religious object) – which establishes the humanness of the enemy and suggests the moral equivalence of the combatants.

Hanks has created a stir with his recent comments emphasizing the racism of Americans toward the Japanese in WWII, because, says Hanks, the Japanese were so different in appearance and in culture. To many commentators, Hanks has magnified such feelings way out of proportion to historical reality, while ignoring, either from ignorance or design borne of ideology, the fact that Americans fought closely along side many other East Asian ethnicities (e.g., Filipinos, Chinese, Burmese), the tremendous cruelty of the Japanese (e.g., the “Rape of Nanking” and the Bataan Death March), the fact that America was viciously attacked without warning, and the tremendous kindness and effort with which Americans rebuilt Japan after the war. Furthermore, Hanks analogized the views of the American Marines toward the Japanese in WWII to what he feels are current racism-tinged wars in the Middle East today.

In what are probably less than the first 30 minutes of combat sequences in this miniseries, we see the particularly-post-9/11 liberal view that American servicemen, just regular, typical Americans, are often racists and torturers, and are morally equivalent with the enemy. Was every single Marine in WWII the paragon of virtue? Perhaps not, but by all accounts almost every one did his duty in a decent way under tremendous pressure, and yet Hanks and Spielberg chose to portray racism and torture in just the first episode. It’s very hard to understand where their minds have gone off to, and why.


John M Greco

The Movie "Nine" Goes Down For the Count

Nine is about the artistic and marital crises suffered by a prominent Italian movie director in the early 1960s. I saw and enjoyed the original theater version in New York in the early 1980s. However, it looks as though the makers of the movie version had some crises of their own.

Nine, like Chicago, is a musical whose numbers have a surreal aspect to them. In fact, it’s very much like Chicago, and by the same director, but largely without the good acting, the good dancing, the good music, the good lyrics, the good script, and the good plot. The title has to do with the main character's flashbacks and emotional attachment to his nine year old self, but why this particular aspect is so important is not clear, at least in the movie version, although I confess to stretches of, ahem, inattention. It has a large cast of non-Italian, non-singers playing Italians with bad accents who occasionally break out in song; why the makers of this movie chose to cast in singing roles so many actresses who cannot sing may be the eternal question about this film. If you do wind up at the theater, my advice is to have your female companion elbow you for the “Be Italian” number, the only one worth distracting yourself for, and then return to your email, your nap, or your deliberations on places to vacation next summer. The "Folies Bergere" number also could have been pretty good – it has a catchy tune, but having the very overexposed and very-post-ingénue Judy Dench, heretofore and hereafter not known as a singer, belt it out in a dress with a generous décolletage is too much to bear, capturing in a nutshell this miss of a movie.

Richard Balsamo

Remembering Errol Flynn, at 100

Errol Flynn, one of the great movie stars of all time, was born 100 years ago today. He defined the classic movie action hero -- daring and dashing, a leader of men; honorable and purposeful, but devil-may-care and quick to laugh. His roles may not have been unduly complex, but they were bold and heroic. His pictures were often run and much watched, years ago, before movie heroes changed forever.

His signature “swashbucklers” defined the genre and are, at least to this fan, his greatest roles: Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Sea Hawk. All were directed by Michael Curtiz and featured rousing theme music by Erich Korngold. Flynn’s co-star in the first two, and in six other of his movies, was the great Oliva de Havilland, and character actor pal Alan Hale had roles in 11 of Flynn’s movies by my count. Captain Blood, as good as any he made, was his first lead and his break out film.

Another favorite of mine, and of one of my sons, is the WWII action picture Objective Burma. Same character type – a bold, determined leader with an important mission. He made many other films, of course, including many Westerns, most notably They Died with Their Boots On and Virginia City. He was a great actor, but remarkably, though perhaps not inexplicably for Hollywood given its pseudo-sophistication borne of a collective intellectual inferiority complex and its love of self-absorbed drama, he was never nominated for an Academy Award. Flynn would be much more appreciated today by the Hollywood intelligentsia if he had played notably unheroic self-destructive substance abusers on the screen instead of just becoming one in later life.

Flynn was born of Irish and British descent in Tasmania, of all places, where his father was a professor of biology. Expelled from a number of schools for rowdy behavior and perhaps also for inappropriate romantic adventures, after some failed ventures he eventually turned to acting, where his natural charm, good looks, and athleticism led to quick success. He was quite the womanizer, apparently, whose exploits led to the quip “In Like Flynn.” The fast living and drinking prematurely aged him, and his career slowed down. In his later years he lived in Jamaica, and died at age 50 in Vancouver while traveling on personal business. His autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was published shortly after his death.

The lasting image – Flynn standing on his ship’s gunwale amidst the clamor and confusion of a great sea battle, one hand on the rigging and one brandishing a sword, shouting “Over the side men, follow me.”


His daughter Rory Flynn maintains an interesting website dedicated to memories of his career (link).

Richard Balsamo

Bonnie & Clyde -- Killed 75 Years Ago Today and Reborn as Movie Anti-Heroes

Depression-era bank robbers and killers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were themselves killed 75 years ago today in a controversial police shoot out in rural Louisiana. The couple were romanticized at the time by some in a seemingly ambivalent public, perhaps reflecting widespread anger with the perceived failures of the banking system in particular and the capitalist system in general. This theme was picked up by Arthur Penn when he made the very successful 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde (link), which made stars of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Reflecting on all this for a few moments today, to my memory it seems that this movie was one of the first somewhat revisionist American movies to celebrate the homicidal criminal as a somewhat sympathetic figure. To be sure, there were previous films about Depression-era gangsters (Public Enemy; Little Caesar), but none that seem to humanize and soften, in part with comedy, criminals that murdered policemen and civilians. Other such movies followed, most notably the Godfather trilogy.

It seems at least one Hollywood producer thinks the American gangster as romantic anti-hero theme still has legs -- to wit, the soon-to-be-released movie about John Dillinger, who eventually met his own demise, two months after that of Bonnie and Clyde, outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater at the hands of lawmen tipped off by the Lady in Red.

R. Balsamo

John Ford's The Quiet Man, a Film For All Seasons

This evening I watched some of John Ford’s The Quiet Man, an old favorite. A labor of love for Ford, a film he long angled to make, it is arguably his best film, and certainly his funniest, which is saying quite a bit given the many masterpieces of the man considered to be America’s greatest film director. It was a family affair, with many relatives of Ford, John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Barry Fitzgerald, and Maureen O’Hara either in front of the camera or behind it. The humor and characterizations may be broad, but the sentiment is deep. I have a T-shirt, framed and hanging as a poster, a gift bought for me in Ireland by an Orangeman friend, no less, that proclaims the film to be “John Ford’s Greatest Triumph.”

There’s record warmth today in Chicago, and it’s a nice soft night, so I think I’ll go join me comrades and talk a little treason.

The photograph is of a large poster hanging in the Erie Café, an Italian restaurant on Chicago’s near North Side. Not so surprising, for after all wasn’t St. Patrick part-Roman?

Richard Balsamo

With “Jesse Stone: Thin Ice,” Selleck & Harmon Add Another Fine Film to the Excellent “Stone” Series

Last night the film “Jesse Stone: Thin Ice” (link) was aired on CBS-TV. It’s the fifth movie in the ongoing “Jesse Stone” series (link) which is based on novels by Robert B. Parker. The movies tell the story of policeman Jesse Stone’s experiences in solving crime and in rebuilding his life after becoming police chief in a small Massachusetts coastal town.

All five stories feature a heavy dose of crime mystery but contain a backstory of Stone’s troubled nature and difficulty moving on. He’s melancholy, he drinks, and he’s hurt and haunted by his ex-wife who occasionally calls to talk.

The films feature taut plots and fine-tuned character studies. Tom Selleck is outstanding as the world-weary, reluctant warrior with a strong sense of moral duty. All the films are well written, well paced, and well acted. Last night’s story was, like all the others, directed by Robert Harmon and executive produced by Tom Selleck (who also co-wrote a couple of the scripts).

In short, a fine addition to an excellent series. This is the first of the five that I've seen on TV -- I've watched the rest on DVD. I'm generally not aware of what's on prime-time network TV (and I almost missed this one), but this "made-for-TV" movie is a prime example of what such movies could be, should be, but rarely are. It's far better than most films made for theaters. I would recommend those not yet hooked get the four DVDs and start at the beginning.


R. Balsamo