The artistry of Fritz Lang's direction makes this scene far more exciting than this description, not to mention more frightening; and this is merely the first of many such moments.  Even before the action begins, the title suggests two obvious questions, which the film only partially answers—who is Mabuse and what is his testament?

Few Germans in 1933 would have trouble supplying a quick answer to the first question.  Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler was an enormous popular movie in 1922.  Lasting four-and-one-half hours (screened as two separate movies), it tells of a master criminal, gambler, stock manipulator, and debaser of currency.  That last would have special meaning to its original audience because it was shot at the height of the hyperinflation, which instantly made Mabuse at the very least an allegorical type of the then current most evident social evil or, better, a symbol of the true nature of rampant evil in the world.  Mabuse viewed from this angle, represents the pattern for how to perceive social destruction and societal falsification of reality, as well as providing something of a blueprint for intuiting its cause.

Here we must insert the obligatory aside about “conspiracy theories.”  To dismiss entirely any thought of social conspiracy is tantamount to asserting that powerful people never, ever get together to discuss what they hope to accomplish, that some of these aims may violate basic morality, and that they never make any arrangements to carry out their desires.  Stated this way, what the incredulous dismiss as “conspiracy theory” is little more than what the powerful would call “planning.”  The self-evident fact that such blueprints are made (or did the Bolsheviks or French Revolutionaries spring from nowhere?) becomes obscured because of the sheer array of cocksure reductionist propaganda of modern media (controlled by those who tell everybody what everybody is supposed to “know”) acting as watchdog while barking reassurances; and, almost invariably when some naïve soul places all the blame on one group of any kind, especially a group of people or an organization that clearly lacks the required power, the ensuing ridicule often sounds far more strident than the poor soul making prognostications.  Thus the conspiracy theorists and their critics.  Those of us with a lick of sense rightly reject such conclusions even if the partially deluded chaps are often hold onto an ear or a tail like the blind men and the elephant.

Mabuse, then, is the embodiment of evil, a type of the Dark One.  What then is his testament?  At the end of the 1922 film, Mabuse goes mad.  In the 1933 picture, we learn that he always sits up in bed and, in a catatonic state, scribbles writings and drawings which augur vast criminal schemes which even provides his rationale.  His purpose as narrated by a voiceover bears close examination in cold print:

Humanity's soul must be shaken to the very depths, frightened by unfathomable and seemingly senseless crime.  Crimes that benefit no one, whose only objective is to' inspire fear and terror, because the only ultimate purpose of crime is to establish the empire of crime—a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world doomed to annihilation.  When humanity subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law—then the time will come for the empire of crime.

Sounds to me like Sam Francis' idea of anarcho-tyrrany.

The superficial story about Lang's movie is that he completed Testament just in time for it to be the first film banned by the Nazis upon their ascendency to power, which is factually true.  The movie does cut close to the bone and is easily read as being specifically anti-Nazi.  In reality, Goebbels stated as the reason for prohibiting exhibition of the film that the German public did not need reminders of the evils of the Weimar Republic at that time.  In the late 30s, however, a truncated version of Testament was release which leeaves the impression that the story is about that earlier unlamented regime; but how easy it is to project one's own evils onto another.

Actually, the entire movie is about just such projections, one of the few fruits of Dr. Freud's work that holds water.  Only the police inspector, Herr Lohmann (a character who also appears in Lang's previous film M). and who eventually unravels the ever expanding mysteries, fully escapes being part of what is not so much as vast conspiracy as a vast enigma.  He penetrates layer after layer of puzzles only to find, what?  The ravings of a madman?  Surely, but which madman?  Mabuse?  Just at the moment the plans for a criminal empire are succeeding, we learn Mabuse is just another corpse wearing a toe tag.

Even as audience, we are not precisely certain whether the horror is supernatural and that Mabuse posthumously possesses another's body or whether that possession is merely the ravings of someone who has taken Mabuse's faux Nietzschean fevers to heart.  Nor does it really matter.  Nor is it accidental that both villains, although equally exposed as not being the ultimate source of the terror, are psychiatrists.  The doctors of the mind, those who were to rival only the clergy in announcing their intentions to help the psyches of others, are the most warped of all.  Given the hegemony of Freudian pseudo-science at that time, one cannot but speculate whether the Viennese humbug and the very real ills he wrought are among the sword thrusts of Lang and his screenwriter/wife Thea von Harbou.

Although I have no desire to google the word “film” with the phrase “man behind the curtain,” I would bet that the first page or two of results would almost all refer to The Wizard of Oz (speaking of humbugs—the wizard himself that is).  Nor have I any idea if Toto's snapping at the heels of the wizard was part of the book.  Perhaps a reader with a better memory than mine can inform us; but I like to think Frank Morgan's bumbling was a comic allusion to the Lang movie where all the terrorists take their orders from “the man behind the curtain,” an unseen menace perceived as a shadow apparently holding a microphone and demanding his henchmen execute plots of destruction and death.  Pay quite close attention to this man behind the curtain.

Evil is arbitrary, random, and irrational in Lang's world.  Although almost never mentioned, Lang was raised a Catholic and returned to the faith toward the end of his life.  The missing piece in any jigsaw of Lang criticism is his absorbed Catholic morality that mixes with his decidedly Germanic accent.  For most of his life he was a non-practicing Catholic and rather a womanizer, even once having been shot by his producer over an affair with the latter's wife.  Not pretty.  I only know about his late conversion because the Jesuit who was on my dissertation committee told me so and was, in Lang's last days, his confessor.  He informed me that in theological conversation, Lang's idea of heaven was just a tad short of Valhalla.

No matter what Lang's shortcomings, his understanding of the nature of evil was profound.  In film after film, he depicts social evil as an underground criminal organization, usually run as a bureaucracy.  We never quite get to the source.  The culprits are akin to the old Quaker Oats boxes upon which is a picture of a figure holding up a box, upon which is the picture of a figure holding up a box, upon which is a picture...  Corruption is not only illusionary, it slowly shrinks into nothing real.  An absence.  Isn't evil often theologically defined as the absence of good?  Isn't the abuse of intellect and will insanity, by definition?

Much of the plot, it should be noted, recalls Saturday morning serials.  Testament even includes a clever escape from certain death in a room closed and securely locked.  The stuff of pulp fiction.  Come back next week.  In America, such fare largely consists of cheaply made thrills offered for children or the undemanding, and most often undemanding children.  Such was not the case in Europe.  Louis Feuillade's serials, especially Fantomas, Les Vampires, and Judex—which were all about criminal conspiracies—hold up remarkably well on any level, so long as the plot devices are not examined too closely.  Lang added metaphysical depth to the genre as early as his intended series of features in 1919 (only two were made before funds ran out).  Serial-like elements permeate almost all Lang's German movies.  By 1933, he had refined these techniques so that he could produced something truly chilling.

The more the news informs us of terror bombing, the more we hear of rioting and looting by youth mobs who have no real motivation, the more we fear because with good reason we may imagine something forbidding may lurk around the next corner, the more relevant is this film.  Herr Lohmann is clever, but a bit clownish when all is said and done because circumstances hamstring him.  He is an honest copy, but officials may be part of the problem.  What if the cause of our ills, at least as allegory, is some raving lunatic who is also a diabolist?   Sound crazy?  Pay close attention to the man behind the curtain.

Yet there is the still, small voice of hope as there must be if we are not to despair.  Good people still fight the evil.  One of the criminals rejoins decent humanity to fight the evil along with his intended bride.  Evil is never defeated, but must be faced in the dark.  Chesterton's great lines from The Ballad of the White Horse may serve us as guide:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

[An abridged version of this article will appear in a forthcoming issue of Gilbert Magazine.]

In a Borzage film, scarcely five minutes ever pass, except in several potboilers the studios foisted on him, without some reference being made, at least obliquely, to Catholic doctrine, philosophy, or art.  Herve Dumont, in the most complete study of Borzage to date, claims him for the Masons of all people.  This is a most extraordinary claim from someone who has actually watched his films.  Even if Borzage dabbled in that group at one point, trying to interpret his films in that light makes hash of his work.  Dumont is the first to analyze all extant Borzage movies, even his early ones in the mid 1910s as a cowboy actor.  He provides a sound guide for interpretation except when he broaches the subject of religion.  Then, every time his fingers hit the keyboard, nonsense pops up on his screen.  The sacramentalism of Borzage’s films are self-evident to anyone retaining even the faintest memory of Christian teaching.  Dumont doesn’t.

Let us take the example of Liliom (1930).  This highly stylized production of the Molnar play was later the source material for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Comparing the two is like comparing Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story.  Whatever the musical’s virtues, it ultimately trivializes the original.  In Carousel, the return of the dead carnival barker once more to earth for a glimpse of his daughter appears little more than occasion for the bombastic reprise of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”  The gates of heaven open wide for Billy with rousing sentimentality.  Whatever else this may be, Christianity is not part of it.

Even the original Molnar play does not quite take the afterlife seriously.  The Fritz Lang film of this material follows the spirit of the original, the heavenly host resembling nothing so much as a Gallic version of the Keystone Kops, these spirits being the predecessors of all the Clarences out to get their wings.  Remember It's a Wonderful Life.

Borzage strips the particular judgment of Liliom in the next world of all but a fitting portion of comedy.  That which remains affords these scenes something of the feeling, if not exactly the content, of a medieval mystery play--perhaps a little thing the cobblers might have cooked up for the fair.  Liliom spends ten years waiting to see his daughter in a place we are made to realize will help cleanse him from his sins.  The dialogue emphasizes that this is Purgatory, though not expressly stating the word outright in Protestant, 1930 America.  Even though Liliom claims he hasn’t repented, he protests far too much. His pride is not yet washed away.  His tone and demonstrated sorrow, however, make clear he desires above all to make things right with heaven and earth.

Sources I have read maintain that even some Catholic countries actually banned the film because of an irreverent depiction of the afterlife.  If true, this simply affirms that the Church was woefully tardy in reading films aright; it had, as always, bigger fish to fry.  In truth, H.B. Warner, who portrays with gusto the Chief Executive of the Celestial Regions, only three years earlier gave the world the Cecil B. DeMille version of Christ in The King of Kings.  The latter film alternates between ubiquitous sentimentality and sensationalism, and was a more fit candidate for an intelligent censor, if that is not an oxymoron.

Almost all the first two-thirds of the movie centers on the love of Julie (Rose Hobart in her best role) for Liliom (Charles Farrell).  He appears at first to have no redeeming (if not redeemable) qualities.  His conceit is unbearable and he treats women detestably, the surest sign of a cad.  One particularly nefarious of his hangers on talks him much too easily into committing armed robbery.  When captured he stabs himself and then lingers a short while before dying.  Well, at least Farrell doesn’t whine for a change.  The man was the classic case of the dashing silent star with a voice unsuitable for the talkies.  Borzage was the only director that could tone him down; but we shall soon see why we need to care for Liliom.

Borzage’s world most often centers on lovers, but saying that will probably conjure the old Hollywood conception of love, a false mythology from which any sensible person would flee as he would an open cesspool.  In 1930, at least we needn’t fear having our noses rubbed in the rampant concupiscence depicted today with satanic glee.  Borzage focuses almost always on love that leads to marriage that further leads to family.  This is the cornerstone of his world.  In his tragedies, death prevents family, and most of his films are tragic.  We come in these movies to a world kin to Romeo and Juliet.  The emotional climax of Liliom comes at that moment when his soul meets his ten-year-old daughter.  He tries to reach out to her, but she only knows her mother's carefully honed image of the dead carnival barker.  The soul of the real Liliom when given the chance is still too much in need of cleansing, which he quickly proves by slapping the child in his frustration because she does not love him instantly.  The girl later tells her mother that the tramp’s slap not only did not hurt but felt like love.  Although that is in the original play, Molnar's original lacks the added purgatorial meaning of the slap.  In the Borzage version, love was Liliom's genuine intention, and he is slowly learning, albeit a bit too late for this valley of tears.

This movie is now readily available for the first time since its initial run as part of a package set, but the individual films can be rented.  It is well worth the ninety-two minutes of our time, but I wish to linger over one shot which Borzage holds long enough to force on the viewers’ attention, and which should put to rest any lingering doubts as to whether or not to apply a Catholic reading to his work.  When Julie, Liliom's wife, mourns over his dead body of Liliom, she ceremoniously bends forward as if in prayer and in the classic pose of the pieta.  The only light in the darkness comes from a single candle flame behind her.  What we see next would look like a cinematic blunder to anybody who hasn’t internalized Catholic iconography.  The candlelight appears to rest on top of Julie’s head, seemingly to create the identical mistake often made in family snapshots when something behind the subject, usually a tree, appears to sprout comically from the smiling loved one.  This can be the source of light amusement at home, but when a meticulous visual artist creates a scene like this, he does it intentionally.  Visual artists of integrity may make many blunders, but not this one.

Julie’s pose coupled with the flame resting on her head resemble many paintings of the Virgin Mary at Pentecost.  The spiritual element of the stationary flame is actually better here because the medium permits us to see the flame in motion.  The Holy Spirit’s decent on the action, represented by the flickering of the candle, while Julie intercedes for him in prayer, remains on-screen for one shot only, but is held for a good fifteen seconds, which is long enough for everyone who is aware of what he is seeing to get the point and to reflect on it.  The camera cuts back and forth to parallel action in the story, but Julie for the rest of scene has now moved to a more conventional pose, with the flame now to her right.  The efficacy of prayer has taken place quietly.  Immediately follows Liliom's sojourn into the afterlife.  I have encountered no critic yet who understands completely what transpires in this scene.  Heaven has heard Julie’s prayer, through Mary, to God.

This tale of the efficacy of prayer is only one of many masterpieces by this neglected artist.  He reached his absolute peak about 1926-1940, securing a number of appropriate projects within the studio system and often turning fair to good material into superior works of art.  Perhaps you have seen one of his great films without knowing who directed it.  Because he is so little remembered except by people who don’t really understand his religious dimension, a short list of his best films seems appropriate for anyone whose interest has been piqued:  Seventh Heaven; Street Angel; Lucky Star, Bad Girl; A Farewell to Arms (1932); No Greater Glory; Little Man, What Now; History Is Made at Night; Big City; Three Comrades; Strange Cargo; The Mortal Storm; The Vanishing Virginian; Moonrise.  This list is not exhaustive.  To be sure he made lesser movies, especially in his two years at Warner Brothers where he continually received unsuitable assignments; but, despite the occasional dud of a project which no one could have overcome, Frank Borzage is at the apex of American film directors.

Since his earliest appearances in folk ballads of the 13th century, Robin Hood has been a slippery fox of a hero. He’s a man who thumbs his nose at the powerful while going his merry way aiding the powerless. To this day, the King Johns and Nottingham sheriffs the world over fume at his impudent exploits and hurl interdictions at his spritely, elusive form. But to no avail. The outlaw of Sherwood Forest can no more be captured than can a will-o’-the-wisp.

There will always be a Robin, especially on the movie screen, which has become a second home as natural to him as Sherwood. Robin has appeared in over 80 films. He ranks with Tarzan and Jesse James in his wide popular appeal, and this explains why he has been so cinematically successful. The economics of film—big-budget film, anyway—require that productions draw audiences in the hundreds of millions if they are to be profitable. The best way to guarantee attendance in these numbers is to feature heroes with whom the masses can gladly identify. Given the choice between a Louis Auchincloss boardroom patrician and a Raymond Chandler mean-street habitué, a filmmaker knows where to place his bet.

In short, since Robin Hood appeals to everyone who has ever felt stymied or abused by those in power, his demographic, as the marketers would say, is virtually boundless. He’s the perfect film hero.

In his new adaptation of the ancient legend, Ridley Scott has kept this firmly—too firmly—in mind. While almost all film incarnations of the rascally hero have invoked the class antagonism implicit in the original stories, Scott has done more than invoke: He’s pounded it home. And that’s where his film’s problem begins. Obsessed with his message of class strife, Scott and his favorite actor, Russell Crowe, have squeezed the fun out of the story by treating it with a seriousness that at times borders on the looney.

In the first 15 minutes of the film, we meet Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston), that famously un-English English king who, by some accounts, spent no more than a few months on English soil, not that you would know that from this or any of the other films that celebrate him. Scott’s Richard is making his way home from the Third Crusade, but he has stopped at the Château de Châlus-Chabrol, a castle in Normandy, so he can sack it both for his amusement and to recoup the funds he’s squandered in Jerusalem. As his archers unleash a storm of arrows at the defenders manning the ramparts above, a French cook appears on the walkway behind the castle’s parapet. He is bringing a bucket of soup to his beleaguered warriors, who have been busily returning a fusillade of their own on the English below. “Get your soup, get your soup,” he calls out amid the fletching. With Gallic sang-froid, these fellows refuse to forego their luncheon because of a military inconvenience. They have their principles, after all. When one of the castle’s defenders falls to an English arrow, the others carry on with their meal. The cook takes up the abandoned bow, notches an arrow, and, without taking much aim, sends it flying. Thunk: It goes right through Richard’s neck. Seeing this, the cook does a little dance to celebrate such a felicitous regicide. More than two hours later in this long film, another commoner will shoot another arrow through another aristo’s neck to the unparalleled jubilation of a cast of plebeian thousands.

In between these blows against the privileged, we watch other instances of class difference being dispelled. Robin (Crowe) and his men disguise themselves in the armor of dead knights in order to pass for nobles. When one of his followers raises fears that their imposture may be discovered, Robin assures him in fine egalitarian tones, “There’s no difference between a knight and any other man but what he wears.” Nonetheless, he will shortly find himself frostily hosted by a knight’s widow, the doughty Marian (Cate Blanchett), who makes him sleep on the floor outside her bedroom in the company of her hounds. Her father-in-law, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow), has decided that Robin should be passed off as his dead son (and, thus, Marian’s husband). This stalwart, he reasons, will be able to defend their land and Marian’s honor from the designs of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, for Robin now carries the Loxley family’s sword, engraved with their commitment to democratic revolution: “Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions.” (Sounds a bit too 1776 for the 13th century, doesn’t it?)

For her part, Marian has doubts about Robin’s designs. “If you so much as touch me,” she chillingly warns him, “I’ll sever your manhood.” Just to show he’s not too uppity, Robin later joins her peasants plowing and seeding her fields. But when he discovers that his long-dead father had been a visionary stonemason with a bent for political philosophy, all bets are off. About 1160, it seems, Robin’s dad concocted a proto-Magna Carta that would find its more lapidary form in 1215. Robin likes the early version so much that he defiantly proposes its virtues to the notorious tax-gouger King John. Upon hearing the charter’s stipulations regarding the rights of men (in a rare deference to history, Scott’s scriptwriter, Brian Helgeland, doesn’t mention women’s rights), John scoffs, “Would you have me build every man a castle?”

Robin responds blandly, “Every Englishman’s home is his castle.” The commoner onlookers go wild with democratic glee. I wonder if at the time the fettered among John’s subjects would have joined in so lustily. They weren’t slated to get much out of the charter. Few of them would have understood it at all.

Populism was the theme of previous Robin Hood productions, but they usually kept the proto-proletarian dynamic in check. In Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1922) and Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Robin was a noble. Curtiz made Errol Flynn’s Robin a minor sort of baronet until the very end, when good King Richard returns and elevates him a goodly number of ranks and grants him the right to marry Olivia de Havilland’s Maid Marian. It was an ending meant to bring Robin the outsider back within the precincts of civilized decorum. (Speaking of which, I am reminded of an anecdote Miss De Havilland related in an interview she gave in the 1970’s. In a bid to add verisimilitude to their performances, Flynn had tried to convince the 19-year-old that they should practice the marriage act in their off-hours. De Havilland asked Flynn if he weren’t already married. He stammered, well, yes, but he was going to get a divorce at the first possible moment; she laughed and politely turned down the Australian roué.)

Unlike Curtiz’s Robin, Scott’s is still on the outs when we see him last. In fact, he has arrived at the starting point of Curtiz’s film, and Scott ends with a title card reading “The Legend Begins.” We know what that means.

Crowe makes a fine commoner brimming with righteous anger at royal injustices. He’s dour, stolid, and gruff. His hair is shorn short in Roundhead fashion, betokening his seriousness. He might almost be a proto-Puritan plotting revolution, so glumly determined does he seem as he lumbers about. Although his followers display some liveliness now and then, this Robin is decidedly not the merry fellow of the ballads, and Crowe is not the man for this role. You only have to imagine how ridiculous he’d look if, instead of going hatless as he does, he had worn Flynn’s bright green cap and pheasant feather on his round head. The one sure accomplishment of Scott’s film is that it reveals how inspired Curtiz’s version was and how perfectly Flynn inhabited the role. Flynn’s characteristic stance in scene after scene is to stand apart from others, hands on hips, arms akimbo, as he laughs delightedly at whatever foolery has just transpired, whether it’s the dastardly Sir Guy (a wonderfully hammy Basil Rathbone) seething at having been forced to don peasant’s garb, or his own discomfiture at the hands of Little John, who gives him the famous lesson in wielding a staff on a log bridge, a scene that Scott oddly ignores.

Then there are the companion scenes that open and close Curtiz’s film. In the first, Robin confronts King John in his own castle. He sits lounging insouciantly before the king’s table, one leg thrown over his chair’s arm, as he casually indicts the king for his many wrongs. John quietly signals his retainers, and they circle and pounce on the impudent Robin. As they reach down for their prey, he slips from underneath their clumsy arms, wrests a sword from a bewildered knight, and begins to make his nimble escape. Curtiz echoes this scene in the final minute of his film. King Richard rewards Robin by performing an impromptu marriage for him and Marian. After the ceremony, the former outlaw, now turned loyal vassal, and his new wife are surrounded by his cheering followers, who soon grow baffled when they realize the couple seems to have disappeared mysteriously from underneath them. They and the king look round the royal court and discover Marian and Robin have slipped away to the hall’s great doors, where they turn and salute their friends before running off. These scenes perfectly express the nature of Robin Hood. He’s a spontaneous, mercurial fellow, unbound by protocol and propriety, a free spirit whose purpose is to remind his audience that those who oppress others are inherently ridiculous and, with luck, can be overcome with daring and good humor. Naive, certainly, but nevertheless tonic, especially so in 1938 during the Depression and on the eve of the war. This timing may explain the partial paradox of making Robin a noble. Left-leaning Curtiz, a Jewish Hungarian émigré, surely looked to the aristocratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Robin who would save Europe from the Nazis.

I don’t mean to say that Scott’s film is a failure when compared with Curtiz’s. It has many interesting features. Its recreation of the look and texture of medieval life is quite convincing. The grim, rudimentary buildings and halls, the dirt and noise, the muddy fields, the soiled clothing—it all looks genuine. When Marian is forced to help Robin out of the chain mail and underclothing that he hasn’t removed for months, you can almost smell the odor she has to endure. The direction and acting aren’t bad. It’s just that Scott’s Robin has nothing much to do with the quicksilver charm of the legendary figure whose name he so unaccountably bears.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and captures the attention of us all, high and low, wise and foolish. It is also arguable that movies, like literature and architecture, reflect something of the soul of the particular nation that produces them. If so, we indeed need to be concerned about the American soul.

Until the late 60’s, our cinema—whether contemporary or costume drama, comedy, Western, or war film—reflected a general baseline of Middle American values. It was not usually great art, but it was consoling entertainment and a source and reflection of a national consensus. And it portrayed with sympathy the real “diversity” of this far-flung Union—New England, the Big Apple, the Old South, the Midwest, and the West.

The catastrophe known as the 60’s—marked by a collapse of morals, political fanaticism and violence, multiculturalism, and the ever-tighter centralized control and enforced uniformity of all phases of life by the bicoastal elite—coincided with the degradation of American cinema. Now we have godless nihilism and self-indulgence, violence for violence’s sake, every form of sexual promiscuity, filth for the sake of filth, and “creativity” generally limited to technological fantasy, sequels, prequels, dramatization of comic books, and rip-offs of European and Japanese stories. The masters of our multicultural monoculture have little talent but plenty of power and money, and our cinema now reflects their minds and souls.

This is not the whole picture, of course. There are still “independent” productions that portray actual American people and situations and that manage to come to public attention. It is not difficult to produce a good book or a good movie. The problem is getting anyone to hear about it and finding a distributor. The mass media seldom reflect anything but the works our masters want to be celebrated and the absence of those works they want to be censored or ignored. All you need to remember is the reception given Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Ron Maxwell’s historical epic Gods and Generals.

Amazingly and refreshingly, two excellent new and old-fashioned films, Firetrail and The Last Confederate, have appeared close together and are available on DVD. They doubtless have faced and will face the distribution problem, but they give a comforting indication of what American cinema could be if it were decentralized and reflected the true “diversity” of what is left of our real country. Real American culture has always been regional, for that is the only way that our vast Union can be fairly represented and where remnants of the real America are still to be found.

Both of these films deal realistically and movingly with an unfashionable subject—the experiences of the people of South Carolina in the winter of 1865, when they became victims of the first large-scale American exercise of total war (something which is still denied by establishment historians but can be proved a thousand times over by the documents of the time). General Sherman’s March is even yet regarded in some quarters as a great feat of arms and military genius. Actually, it involved little war other than skirmishes with outnumbered cavalry and home guards and was a calculated destruction of the means of civilian life—houses, private valuables and heirlooms, food, barns, crops, livestock, schools, churches, convents, whole towns. The high point was the deliberate torching of the surrendered and occupied city of Columbia, previously admired for its loveliness.

Both movies are products largely of regional inspiration and regional talent on both sides of the camera and reflect genuine regional memory, a thing rare in America and even rarer in the movies. Even some critics who have boggled at “nostalgia” for Southern traitors and slavers have acknowledged that the films carry a great deal of “authenticity.” Indeed they do. As renderings of historical experience they are faithful and subtly artistic. Costumes, action, dialogue, and personalities carry conviction as a representation of the real historical experience of certain Americans. Those audiences who have viewed these films in limited release have been enthusiastic.

Firetrail is produced by independent filmmaker Christopher Forbes and is based on the 2005 romance novel by “Lydia Hawke,” though it rises far above that genre. The chief actors—Tripp Courtney and Jim Hilton as Confederate soldiers and Lin Laffitte as a beleagured lady—are natives of the region, relatively unknown but with some “mainstream” film experience. They are excellent. So is the music from the Southern Rock group Beaver Creek.

The Last Confederate covers the same territory with similar virtues of authentic environment and native actors. Written and directed by Julian Adams, it is based on the experiences of his ancestors, Confederate Capt. Robert Adams and his Northern bride Eveline McCord. These parts are played with skill by Julian Adams and Gwendolyn Edwards. I am a little, just a little, less enthusiastic about The Last Confederate than I am about Firetrail. The title The Last Confederate is inappropriate, there is too much genealogical pride, and Tippi Hedren and Mickey Rooney have needlessly been corralled in for small parts.

Some good news and a warning. The good news is that those responsible for both films have in production other projects in the same vein. The warning: Contemporary manners-challenged Americans might find the dialogue a little slow and stilted. But it captures truly the times and people portrayed. In those days they understood what George Garrett has written: that manners are a recognition that our fellow human creatures, all of them, are made in the image of God.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane person must resist. Those who accept it invariably contaminate their relationships—especially intimate ones—with a lethal dose of powermongering. Of course, this obvious consequence of turning individuals into political operatives didn’t deter the truly ideological feminists. More than anything else, they wanted to raise political questions within the precincts of the marriage state: Who’s in charge de facto, and who’s in charge de jure? They were on a campaign to stake their flag on the nuptial continent in order to rescue their male-colonized sisters regardless of whether they needed or wanted rescuing. In the process, they opened up a rich field of resentment to be tilled by spouses—both women and men—with real and imagined grievances. Of course, their ever-vigilant lawyers began staking claims of their own. When the primary nuptial concern is who has the power, you can forget about waiting until death do you part. Splitsville is no farther than the nearest courtroom.

Now consider the near inversion of the feminist proposition: The political can become the personal. It has infinitely more merit than its feminist obverse, for it is a salutary warning. Should you allow politics to invade your personal relations, you can expect trouble. Consider Hillary Clinton. What must her politicized personal life be like? Eros and politics make hideous bedfellows. But I’ll say no more of our favorite Arkansas couple, for I have a more astonishing nuptial specimen to address in Marco Bellocchio’s new film, Vincere, a compelling if not entirely reliable portrait of political power in action.

Bellocchio gives us a highly speculative account of Mussolini’s rise to power as seen through the eyes of his mistress Ida Dalser, who claimed to be the dictator’s wife and the mother of his son. Whatever the truth about Dalser, Bellocchio has made her a victim of politics and, thereby, an early feminist heroine.

The historical record indicates that Dalser began a relationship with Il Duce in 1914, when she was 34, and he 31. Thereafter, little is certain except that Dalser became an annoyance to the great man, so much so that his underlings, at his direction or on their own, sought to keep her away from him and out of the public eye—first, by virtual house arrest at her sister’s home, and then, by institutionalizing her for mental instability. To complete their task, they had one of Mussolini’s henchmen adopt her son, and he put the boy in boarding school out of Dal­ser’s reach.

Bellocchio has made of his version of Dalser both a prism and a subject. Using her imagined treatment at the hands of the fascist, he has portrayed Mussolini as at once charismatic and vicious, a man willing to use his considerable personal magnetism to seduce those useful to him and then discard them when they became inconvenient. In this account, Dalser becomes a proxy for Italians, the clay Mussolini would mold into his vision of the way things should be—which, of course, was his way.

When Dalser first meets Mussolini on the eve of the Great War, he’s a fiery socialist declaring his resistance to the capitalists and the nationalists he claims are driving all of Europe toward conflagration. He also roundly condemns the Roman Catholic Church for rendering ordinary people spinelessly obedient to the powers that be. At a political meeting in Milan, Dalser watches worshipfully as Mussolini demonstrates the folly of obedience to the ancien régime. When his turn to speak comes, he announces that he intends to challenge no less an authority than God Himself. He then gives the Almighty all of five minutes to strike him dead where he stands. If God doesn’t take this opportunity to rid the world of Mussolini’s magnificent impudence, his listeners will be forced to draw the obvious conclusion: The Old Guy doesn’t exist. Once his audience’s initial expression of outrage settles down, they watch in bemused silence as the minutes tick by. When Mussolini’s pocket watch has measured off the fateful five, the God-challenger still stands. “Time’s up; He doesn’t exist,” he concludes with a reassuring smile that not so subtly suggests that he’s ready to take over for the divine absentee. Bellocchio returns to this scene at the end of his film as if to remind us that God’s time rarely synchronizes with human time and, further, that tempting fate has a way of catching up with one, as Il Duce discovered. It’s a bravura moment in a film filled with them, but I found myself wondering if Mussolini actually pulled this stunt. This is a film of defiantly outsized gestures, but it’s also more than a little fanciful.

Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini. With his gleaming coal-black eyes and serious mustache, he makes Il Duce a monster of self-regard. He’s a man who is ready to do or say whatever is needed to advance his cause, which is no more and no less than the advancement of himself. He changes his politics as casually as he might change his socks. After he divested himself of his original pacific views, he came to regard war as a grand opportunity to reclaim Italy’s ancient glory. We see him shouting down his former allies, who demand that Italy stay out of the war. This dramatization seems perfectly plausible. But Bellocchio oversteps the bounds of probability when he has Mussolini declare that “war is the health of the state.” Unless he was a clairvoyant as well as a tyrant, it’s unlikely he would have come up with the same apothegm, word for word, written a year later in an essay by the American radical Randolph Bourne. Not only is the chronology off; so is the intent. Bourne was being darkly ironic. His point was that the state often wages war unwarrantably to manipulate its population. Threatened by outside forces, people tend to become more tractable in the hopes that their cooperation with their leaders will fend off the enemy. It’s the weapons-of-mass-destruction syndrome. That Bourne’s jibe perfectly expresses Mussolini’s strategy doesn’t quite excuse Bellocchio’s carelessness with facts.

As Dalser, the delicate-featured Giovanna Mezzogiorno hasn’t the heavy chin and thick body of the real woman, but she is nevertheless impressive, whether robed or, as it often happens, not. Her infatuation with Mussolini is absolute. When he loses his reporter’s position at the socialist newspaper Avanti!, she sells everything she has, including the beauty salon she had owned and run in Milan. She then awaits him, naked next to the pile of money she has raised. Did this happen, or is this Bellocchio’s perfervid imagination at work once more? Their lovemaking is similarly fraught with questions. Did Mussolini really stare into the middle distance as if contemplating his glorious future while he performed conjugally with the adoring Ida underneath him, her eyes soulfully focused on her hero at work? Does it matter? Isn’t it just one more operatic flourish in the cause of the greater truth? Here’s the rub: Bellocchio clearly wants to dismantle Mussolini’s recently rehabilitated reputation. He especially wants to indict him for manipulating the Italian masses. This being the case, wouldn’t it have been better if he had not so brazenly tried to manipulate his own mass audience?

One of the best features of the film is its use of newsreels from the period. Once Mussolini leaves Dalser about a third of the way into the narrative, Timi disappears. In his place, we get the real Duce passing by in motorcades, making speeches from balconies and pacing about at his leisure, chin jutted, lip curled, and chest pumped. What a comic spectacle is the real thing! No one who has seen these newsreels can have avoided the question: How could such a clownish man have compelled fascistic allegiance from the usually individualistic, skeptical Italians? Could it be that the popularity of opera, with its over-the-top histrionics, had prepared Italy to take seriously such a grotesque hero? Whatever the case, the contrast between Timi and the real thing is startling. Timi is quite handsome, his refined features evident despite his scowling, glaring, and mustachioed impersonation of the young Mussolini. This may be deliberate. After all, Bellocchio wants us to be shocked by the disparity between personal and public personae. It’s a way of emphasizing how the introduction of politics into personal life can distort, even maim, the individual. Certainly Dalser was maimed, and as dramatized, her suffering and anger are moving. Yet one cannot help wondering why she didn’t acquiesce to the inevitable. The Leader was never going to do her right. Bellocchio seems to be saying that she was obsessed with the political component of her devotion. The political had so thoroughly colonized her personal life that she couldn’t surrender hope for the power that she would have gained had Mussolini acknowledged her claims.

More affecting than Dalser’s pain is that of her son, Benito. Here Bellocchio has made an interesting choice and created the best moments in the film. He’s had Timi shave his young Mussolini mustache to play the son who was to die at 27 in a mental ward after what has been reported to be suspicious treatments. As Il Duce, Timi is somewhat monochromatic, because he is playing a driven, monomaniacal man whose default attitude is either staring or glaring beyond anyone around him as he contemplates the destiny that awaits him. But as the son, Timi presents us with an unnerving spectacle. In what has to be understood as a defensive tactic, young Benito takes to mocking his father’s oratorical performances. As he and his friends listen to his father’s broadcasts blaring from speakers positioned ubiquitously in parks and on promenades, he begins to imitate the old man, exaggerating but only slightly his inflections, his pauses, his head nodding. He even imitates the cheers of Il Duce’s adoring crowds, opening his mouth as widely as possible and letting out a ghostly, hissing roar. It’s an eerie, dismaying performance; his face is contorted so that we can’t tell whether he is engaging in mockery or about to have a nervous breakdown. It’s instructive that his friends stop paying attention after a minute or two, as if the spectacle is too much to bear—as, indeed, I found it myself. It’s the perfect instance of the political dominating the personal. The result is horrible to behold. Vincere means “to win,” but we’re left to contemplate what’s lost.

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chronicles’ editors decided to run my September 2009 review of the film on ChroniclesMagazine.org the day after the ceremony. This pleased me. It’s nice having your name attached to a winner. But putting vanity aside, if such is possible, I really do believe, as I said in my original review, that this film about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team hunting IEDs on the streets of Baghdad should be required viewing for all Americans, especially those who continue to think our adventure in the desert is honorable. Anything that advances the film’s notoriety, whether an Oscar or my humble reflections, is all to the good.

Bigelow’s film, made in 2008, had a limited release after a successful run at various independent festivals. Now, with six Oscars, it will reach a much wider audience in re-release at selected theaters and on DVD. Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, a journalist who had accompanied a bomb squad in Baghdad for several weeks, have done a much better job of making us feel the awful futility of the Iraq war than any other film on the subject to date.

Of course, not everyone agrees with me. Several of the folks who read my review online and took the trouble to send in responses said as much. I want to address three of these comments. They are at once pertinent and provocative and have helped me think more closely about why I find the film so effective. I will argue that Bigelow and Boal deployed an aesthetic logic that answers each of my respondents’ reservations.

One respondent liked the film until she learned that several Iraq veterans had questioned its authenticity. The vets were annoyed by the cowboy antics of the protagonist, William James, an explosives technician whose idea of a jolly afternoon is to throw off his padded shrapnel-proof suit, hunker over an IED that has been hog-tied beneath the sand, and pick through its 20-some odd wires hoping to find the single live one before the contraption blows off his head. The vets said no trained explosives technician would behave with such reckless abandon. I suppose they are right in general, but it seems to me they’re leaving out the possibility that James just enjoys danger for its own sake and, of course, for the adrenaline rush that comes with it. It didn’t seem all that improbable that this hot rod would ignore the rule book. Do those who perform wheelies on their Harleys consult safety manuals while pitching their bikes upright at 80 mph?

James’ risk-taking opens for Bigelow the door to her film’s unspoken but nevertheless trenchant politics. Consider her protagonist’s resonant name, William James. It playfully invokes America’s father of pragmatism, the psychologist who claimed we should believe whatever is useful to believe. Can we doubt, then, that Staff Sergeant James is meant to signify our nation’s blind faith in her can-do spirit, her confidence that her sons can sort out any problem that comes their way, however insoluble it may have proved to others over the millennia? And, further, can we doubt that such arrogance led us into our current misadventures? Remember the cakewalk boys of 2003.

Another respondent, Chronicles’ own Clyde Wilson, questioned what he took to be the film’s politically correct stance regarding race. He thought the black actor Anthony Mackie, in the role of Sergeant Sanborn, had been directed to play his character as an improbably brave and competent squad leader. Dr. Wilson is annoyed by what he takes to be liberal Hollywood’s rapturous depiction of minorities. They can’t all be that sterling, can they? But his criticism doesn’t apply here, nor does it more generally. For quite a while now African-Americans have been dramatically freed to be just as vicious, just as buffoonish, and just as dull as any witless honky. Denzel Washington’s best performances have been on the unattractive side of the thespian equation.

To return to Sergeant Sanborn, the first thing to be said is that he is not in charge of the bomb squad. As his rank indicates, he is subordinate to Staff Sergeant James. Second, although Sanborn is portrayed as brave, he’s not exceptionally resourceful nor particularly patriotic. And his loyalty is doubtful at best. Scared shitless by James’ suicidal derring-do, he even considers killing his superior before his stunts get him and the squad’s third member killed. Far from being the noble black of the liberal’s condescending imagination, Sanborn is a man who has made a calculated bet. He has agreed to serve on the bomb squad to shorten his time in Iraq. He wants nothing more than to return home and get on with raising a family, as he explains tearfully and movingly to James late in the film.

What I liked about Bigelow’s film is that it does not hew to the Hollywood clichés. It doesn’t even include a scene in which James breaks down and explains why he behaves with such disregard for life and limb. There is no appeal to a troubled upbringing, no heavy guilt for having accidentally caused a sibling’s death or having once left the garden hose running all night. When Sanborn asks him how he can bring himself to sit down with primed bombs and coolly take them apart, James can only respond that he doesn’t think about it. He just does it. And here’s another of the script’s sly political points. James is the kind of young man the cakewalking neoconservatives find so very useful to their global ambitions. There’s no reasoning why in this boyo. He’s efficiency incarnate, no more and no less.

Another respondent raises an interesting reservation, not about Locker, but about its medium. Robert Reavis agreed with Bigelow’s take on the war but went on to say that she was unlikely to enlighten anyone since film appeals principally to the senses and emotions. Implicit in Mr. Reavis’s comment was that only discursive reasoning can make the fine discriminations necessary to build cogent, compelling arguments. I agree with him up to a point. A fictional film narrative does not have the luxury of indulging in protracted argumentation if it hopes to hold the audience’s attention. It must always move on to the next scene.

This said, we mustn’t scant the considerable resources of narrative art as it moves from one scene to the next. Joseph Conrad made this case in 1910. In his oft-quoted preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” he put forth his aesthetic manifesto:

[A]rt itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. . . . My task . . . is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

While Conrad’s narratives have discursive passages aplenty—some would say they are too plentiful—they are not why his works are remembered today. When we recall Heart of Darkness, it’s not principally Marlow’s morbid perorations on the cold indifference of the universe that come back to us, all that business about an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. No, what comes back is what the text puts before our eyes: the sudden close-up when Marlow discovers by aid of a telescope the skulls atop the poles outside of Kurtz’s compound in the Congo, and the sinister whiteness of the sidewalks in Brussels, relieved only by some random blades of grass sprouting from between their blocks; the white forehead of Kurtz’s self-aggrandizing fiancée, dimly luminous in her otherwise darkened parlor.

Bigelow knows how to deploy Conrad’s method on the screen. No one who sees Locker will ever read the letters IED in quite the same way again. In Locker, these devices don’t explode into fireballs, as do Hollywood’s generic pyrotechnics. When an insurgent sets off an IED in a Baghdad street, the ground shivers silently at first, and then its caked mud sprays into the air with an unendurable concussion. Farther down the street, the rust on a car hood flakes and rises into the air an inch or two. It is as though the whole solid world sleeping under a relentless sun has galvanized with menace, and it becomes momentously clear that for Americans the whole of Iraq is an IED.

When James returns to his Texas home on leave, he takes his wife and infant son to a Brobdingnagian supermarket. Wandering through the aisles of plenty, he finds himself beholding a wall of cereals in day-glo boxes. The dazed look on his face tells us that the war zone has given him new eyes with which to see this familiar American spectacle. This weird consumer display is the objective correlative of the freedom George W. Bush claimed Al Qaeda couldn’t abide. Imagine those robed tribesmen sitting in their caves, gnashing their teeth over our non-nutritious freedom of choice.

This is how artists work. They strive to create what James Joyce called epiphanies, moments of intense revelation. If they do their job well enough, such moments linger in the mind until their full argumentative force detonates upon later reflection.

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I have not read the novel by the South African émigré J.M. Coetzee upon which Disgrace is said to be based.  Nor do I intend to.  Whenever I hear that a movie is "based on" something I think of the cinema mogul in one of Evelyn Waugh's early novels who gave John Wesley a sword and a mistress.

The first and lesser problem here is John Malkovich.  I have heretofore thought well of Malkovich—he has done some interesting things, has a Balkan lineage rare in Hollywood circles, and is reputed to be terrifyingly "conservative" among his colleagues—that is, he has exhibited some independence of mind, rare everywhere these days.

Malkovich's voice and mannerisms have become too well-honed and familiar.  The trend has been obvious for some time and has reached a sad climax in this performance.  Malkovich has destroyed our suspension of disbelief.  We can never forget that we are watching Malkovich playing a part.  This may be in some degree because the character being acted is at the same time so repulsive and so tedious that he can't be believed.  He lacks "motivation," as they say.  More than half the film is spent demonstrating that this character is lecherous, selfish, irresponsible, and, though this might not be intended, boring.  If a message was intended about the society of "the new South Africa," such a goal would have been much better served by a normal character rather than one of distracting oddity.  There are other disgusting, unnecessary touches as well.

Our hero is a divorced urbanite Capetown professor who loses his position because of his seduction of a mixed race (Cape Coloured?) student.  He seems to prefer darker women, though his lechery is without serious racial or any other kind of discrimination.  He next appears at the small remote farm (eastern Cape? Natal?) where his grown, unmarried daughter, a feminist and possibly a lesbian, lives alone.  The only neighbour is a black man who is friendly and helpful but a little too intrusive.  Then three black "youths" show up, gain admittance under a false appeal for help, and proceed to wreck the house, steal everything of value, kill the animals, and gang rape the daughter.  Our hero, meanwhile, after pitiful efforts at resistance, is knocked on the head and locked in the bathroom.

A little later it is discovered that the criminals are relatives and friends of the neighbour, who was conveniently absent that day.  The daughter refuses to call in "the police" on the grounds that if the bad boys are prosecuted, it will become impossible for her to remain on her place.  It is not mentioned that in "the new South Africa" calling the police would probably make no difference anyway.

Here, I suppose, beginneth the lesson.  The daughter is pregnant with a rapist's baby and does not seem too unhappy about it.  After all, the evil has been committed because that is what men are like, not because these happen to be black Africans.  Having a part black child will, at least so she concludes, give her an accepted role in the community of "the new South Africa" and guarantee her safety.  After all, she will have relatives in the neighbourhood.

How are we supposed to feel about this?  I assume that enlightened opinion will applaud this happy ending.  With this example South Africa can now march forward into the long-awaited happy future.  The oppressor and the oppressed have switched places, but are satisfactorily reconciled to the new way of things.  So what if a little violence against the innocent is necessary to make clear who is now the boss?  (Another recent film, The Lovely Bones, seems to promote a similar theme: vicious criminals should not be punished but be forgiven and reconciled with their victims.  A Hollywood trend?)

My dark, reactionary mind, which thinks there is no redemption in this world and that history never rises very far above the raw fundamentals of our flawed nature, sensed another, profounder teaching.  Whether this revelation was intended or is a case of art containing more than the artist was aware of, I know not.  This strikes me as a prescient, dramatic depiction that Western men have lost their courage, will, pride, sense of social obligation, and ability to protect their women.  They no longer display the qualities that made them Western men.  Indeed, one can see already considerable evidence of this in America and Europe as well as among the outnumbered whites of South Africa.  The real message may be that white women are instinctively adapting to their new masters as a tactic of survival for themselves and their offspring.  Celebration or warning?  I suppose it is all a matter of how you feel about it.

Avoidance of entangling alliances does not preclude sincere  interest in other peoples.  Rather,  self-interest, as well as the natural sympathy of free men for oppressed peoples and the natural desire of active minds for understanding, suggest the contrary.

Americans, notoriously provincial (and never more so when they think they are  leading the world), are perhaps even more ignorant than usual about the Palestinian side of that endless "Middle East conflict."   So far as information available to the average American is concerned, Palestinians are "terrorists" and rock-throwing adolescent mobs, with turbaned weirdo leaders who are always disrupting "the peace process."  These two quiet, humane films are worthy expressions of cinematic art and even more valuable in that they give us a more  balanced and nuanced story.  In the interest of fair disclosure here, I admit that where I come from we still hand down family stories about what it was like to be the victims of ruthless invasion and occupation, without rights in your own land.  That may affect my sympathies.   It does seem to me that the Palestinians, imperfect like all of us God's creatures, are one of those peoples who have endured more suffering than they have earned.

Laila's Birthday seems to have been created by  the collaboration of a Palestinian director and European film companies.   It might be called "A Day in the Life of a Palestinian."   The central character, a man of quiet dignity and integrity, spends his day in Ramallah trying to earn a living with a taxi belonging to his brother-in-law, a position considerably beneath his education and experience.  In addition to the normal problems of daily life—cellphone annoyance, car trouble—he must cope with the normal abnormal realities of explosions, checkpoints, and routine humiliation. All the while, he is engaged in an almost classic odyssey in quest of a gift and a cake for his daughter's birthday.  Among other things, this works well as a good family values flick.

The Lemon Tree, said to be based on real events, is a poignant account of the tribulations of a Palestinian widow on the West Bank.  A lemon grove, her only inheritance and livelihood, is targeted for destruction by the Israeli government, who declare it a threat to "state security" because its blocks their surveillance of  a small section of border.  The widow is played to perfection by Hiam Abbass, an Arab-Israeli.  She has a maturely beautiful and subtly expressive face such as we associate with the greatest actresses.  That this film was created by Israelis and portrays the Arab side of a Jewish-Arab conflict, is perhaps a faint sign of hope for peace and justice in the Holy Land.

Neither film is shrill or unbalanced—if anything they are understated.  Israelis are not monsters but mostly regular people carrying out orders which may be unpleasant but which they believe necessary. In The Lemon Tree (as in real life) some of the Israelis have consciences that give them pause about the justice and consequences of the oppression of  the original inhabitants of their land—an oppression which they regard as required  for their own safety.  Both films give more than a hint that the Palestinians—like all the rest of us—suffer much from the selfishness and duplicity of their own politicians as well as from the occupying force.

The Islamic world, with its teeming millions and oil-rich princes, has produced very little worthwhile cinematic art—rather less than Sweden or Australia.  That should tell us something about the culture of the followers of The Prophet.  Iranians, who have produced a number of good films, are an exception, but, of course, they were Persians before they were Muslims.  And Palestine, let us remember, until fairly recent times, enjoyed much of the influence of classical and Christian civilisations and was never fully Islamized.

In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six hour-long episodes of the television drama he made for the BBC in 1985 into a two-hour film. The result is a blivet: ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound casing. No, baloney’s not the word. A genuine blivet is stuffed with what baloney fragrantly becomes after it enters the mouth and takes its winding passage through the alimentary canal. I have used the wrong word not merely to be decorous but because of baloney’s connotation—a thoughtless conglomeration of doubtful meat products devoid of any nutritional sustenance. This comes much nearer to expressing the essential silliness of Campbell’s film. Campbell is, after all, the director of two James Bond films, well-made works to be sure, but high on the baloney index.

In both versions, The Edge of Darkness combines a febrile conspiracy thriller with a blood-soaked revenge drama. The narrative concerns the dark, tangled doings of government officials, nuclear-industry honchos, and environmental terrorists blasting—literally—into the life of a simple, honest man, a seasoned detective named, oddly enough, Craven, who knows next to nothing about the threat they pose to the body politic. Now this is a promising premise. I haven’t seen the television production, but, having read about it, I don’t think I’m wrong to suppose that the original writer, Troy Kennedy Martin, wanted to demonstrate how political machinations on the world stage impinge on private lives.

The series was far more politically ambitious, not to mention ridiculous, than the film. Martin’s script made a blatant appeal to the audience to join with the supporters of the Gaia movement and take up arms to defend the living organism known as Earth against the dread, dead hands of the corporate state—specifically Margaret Thatcher’s England. It was time to save the planet from the depredations that inevitably follow in the train of human interference with nature. It’s to be regretted that the producers of both the television and film versions nixed Martin’s original conclusion. By the agency of some stolen plutonium, Craven was to be transformed into a tree, a sort of ultimate green protest against the vile human world. Few things would have pleased me more than Mel Gibson (Craven) sheathed in bark.

In its blivet form, the story manages to retain some of the environmental urgency of the original series, but this aspect has been forced into the dim background, from which it springs forth furtively and confusingly now and again. In the foreground, the focus is on Craven, a Boston homicide detective whose life is shattered when his daughter, Emma, comes for a visit. No sooner is she through the door than havoc reigns. Since it has been shown endlessly in television advertisements, I suppose I can take the liberty of discussing the opening event that plunges Craven into despair and then transforms him into a vengeful angel of death. Before Emma has had a chance to unpack her bags, she becomes violently ill, and Craven decides to take her to the hospital. As they open the front door of his home, a masked gunman shoots the girl twice with a shotgun, and she dies in Craven’s arms.

When his police colleagues arrive at the scene to investigate, they all assume the gunman was a criminal Craven had inconvenienced in the past. This seems logical but proves wrong, a conclusion Craven reaches when he finds a gun and a Geiger counter among Emma’s effects. Using his detective skills, he begins to piece together the truth. Em­ma had worked as a research analyst at a nuclear facility with the suitably ominous name Northmoor. Having become suspicious that Northmoor’s CEO was doing more than storing nuclear waste, she became involved with an environmentalist group seeking to expose the company for what it is: a criminal enterprise making nukes for . . . well, we never quite learn, although there is a fleeting mention of constructing jihadist dirty bombs. Whether to supply or implicate Al Qaeda goes glaringly, perhaps mischievously, unanswered. I suspect this is one of several instances in which the blivet effect trumps narrative clarity. Anyway, Emma discovered nasty things were afoot, and one thing led to another.

It’s long been the donnée of Hollywood films that corporations are evil, and nuclear corporations unspeakably so, especially because they’re operated in conjunction with the government, which is always suspect, even when a Clinton or an Obama is in the White House. I used to mock this assumption, thinking it the kind of boneheaded reasoning to which the dangerously innocent are given. After witnessing the Bush administration lie to the country baldly and, what’s more, get away with it, I have become considerably more disposed to distrust officials in both the public and the private sectors. A government that can cynically lead its populace into a wholly unnecessary war with the help of defense contractors should not be trusted. Add to this how our major investment banks have been casually betraying the public, and you have the conditions that warrant an all-encompassing skepticism as the only stand one can reasonably take. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Darkness is a serious investigation of the military-industrial-Wall-Street complex. I want to suggest merely that the premise Campbell’s film has invoked as a plot point can no longer be dismissed as blivet filler, though it certainly smells as ripe.

All in all, Darkness may be a conventional melodrama, but it is worth seeing for its acting. As Craven, Gibson is as stolid and relentless as we could wish. Some commentators have complained that he doesn’t give us his usual wild-eyed Lethal Weapon performance. Well, maybe that’s because he’s playing an aggrieved father. He is completely believable, right down to his r-less Boston Irish accent. Yes, the plot works overtime to manipulate our emotions so that, when Craven inevitably dishes out some well-earned violence, we will be cheering him on without a moment’s compunction. This sentimental trickery would be irritating except that it comes in scenes which are among Gibson’s best: the ones in which he recalls his now-dead daughter as a very much alive child. Gibson’s acting hoists these moments clear of the bathos another actor would succumb to. His naturalness with Gabrielle Popa, the four-year-old actress playing Emma as a child, won me over completely.

Fathers the world over will connect with one scene in particular. Emma comes upon Craven shaving. Seeing her fascination with this manly ritual, he takes some of his shaving cream from his face and dabs it on hers. Then he hands her a comb so she can “shave” away the foam from her cheeks, and they both laugh at the results. This simple moment says all we need to know about his devotion to his girl. And, of course, it justifies in advance whatever excess he will use in pursuing her killers. As the 25-year-old Emma, the beautiful Serbian actress Bojana Novakovic brings a pleasing sweetness to her role. She makes us understand that her affection for her father has matured and now includes an ironic, teasing dimension to accommodate what the young inevitably see as the limitations of their elders. At the same time, she’s no less devoted to him than she was at four.

Danny Huston plays Northmoor’s CEO as if he had been dipped in a vat of olive oil; he’s that smooth. When Craven comes calling on him, he barely looks at the detective before turning his back on him while answering his questions. He explains that his daughter’s position at Northmoor had been a lowly one, speaking with a calculated blandness as he surveys the world through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his grand office atop his high-tech redoubt. He is to all appearances an unassailable man. We, of course, know better.

Perhaps the best reason to see this movie is Ray Winstone, a British actor who specializes in tough-guy roles and who joins Gibson in saving Darkness from its own sentimentality. Despite his working-class British accent, he has taken on the role of a fixer named Jedburgh who works for an assortment of high-level administrators in various American intelligence agencies. He’s the fellow you call on when there’s a bit of mopping up to do. Say a spy goes double, or there is a botched operation with undue collateral damage or maybe a risky freelancer still on his feet after the bodies have stopped bouncing—Jedburgh’s your man. And yet Jedburgh would clearly like to get through his assignments with a minimum of carnage. He is most especially tired of taking out the innocent and near innocent in order to clean up for the many twits in high places sucking on the government’s hind teat. His dead-eyed gaze bespeaks a man who has seen quite enough of treachery and violence. All things considered, he’s at an age when he’d rather ponder the metaphysical.

We find this out while he’s having a physical exam. As his doctor looks into his ears and eyes, Jedburgh can’t resist asking, “Do you see a soul in there?” The sawbones replies that the issue is not in his province. This prompts Jedburgh to sum up matters soulful without professional assistance. “We live a while,” he growls with cold bemusement, “and then we die sooner than we planned.” Now, I ask you, could a soulless man come up with such a succinct statement of what it means to be human and all too aware of the inexorable approach of the end?

There are other indications of spirituality in this aged side of beef. While it seems evident Jedburgh has been sent by his masters to remove Craven from the picture permanently, he recognizes a soulmate in the Irish cop and holds back. For his part, Craven sees both the danger Jedburgh poses and his unspoken kinship. He asks the Brit what it takes to do his line of work. To explain, the usually taciturn Jedburgh invokes with unsuspected literary finesse F. Scott Fitzgerald’s index of competence in tight corners: “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And function he does to a very satisfying, if predictable, denouement.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war.  Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation to preach (Lions for Lambs) or taken aim at the wrong targets (In the Valley of Elah and Redacted).  The Hurt Locker takes an entirely different tack.  Putting aside sermons and accusations—well aimed or not—it plunges us into the war with all the fervor of an obsessed documentarian and lets events speak for themselves.  It does what FOX News pretends to do: It reports and lets us decide.  Only the title expresses a political position, and it’s quite indirect at that, since the term hurt locker is never spoken in the film.  It’s a slang expression, meaning to put someone in a painful situation from which there’s no immediate escape.  “If you don’t stop harassing me, I’m going to put you in the hurt locker.”  It serves director Kathryn Bigelow’s purpose perfectly.  By pursuing our gratuitous Middle East adventure, she suggests, we have allowed ourselves to be put in a hurt locker, and now we’re stuck there.

I use the first-person plural we, but that’s only to say that we have all been implicated in this war, not that we’ve all shared equally in its hurt.  Still, most of us have at the very least experienced the anxiety of knowing young people who have gone to Iraq.  They’re the ones, of course, who have really been slammed into this locker.  Bigelow doesn’t bother to say why they have been put there.  Her film has no big revelatory declamations, no angry denunciations of political deceit.  All of that goes unspoken.  Maybe she thinks that, if we can’t crack the locker’s combination of shameless mendacity and scurrilous manipulation perpetrated by our domestic living-room warriors, we deserve to stay locked up a while longer.

Bigelow is known for her well-made but ditzy action adventures, including Point Break.  But here she’s put aside cheesiness and chosen to work with dedicated journalist Mark Boal, who had joined a group of exceptional young soldiers on their Baghdad missions in 2004.  These were members of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), tasked with disarming roadside bombs or, as the Army has it, IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices.  (The Army is nothing if not dispassionately Latinate and antiseptically acronymic in its refusal to say directly what’s at issue.)  These men are supposed to find and defuse bombs hidden in the dirt roads, in abandoned cars, under piles of seemingly stray litter, and sometimes sewn into the body cavities of the dead, bombs set to be detonated by timers, cellphones, tripwires, or the simple bad luck of a thoughtless misstep.  Protect the innocent from the fanatically demented—that’s what the EOD is supposed to do on its IED hunts.

By focusing on a team of three EOD volunteers, Bigelow and Boal have been able to bring the war into pointed focus.  From the moment we invaded, all of Iraq became one big IED, with an ever renewable charge.  It’s blown up again and again despite our troops’ best efforts to defuse it.  It’s killed 4,300 Americans, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  And the real hell of it is that many Iraqis seem to accept the situation.  They live in a culture that continues to think it honorable to kill over a dispute regarding the caliphate succession dating to Muhammad’s death in A.D. 632.  When Muslims haven’t been enthusiastically enslaving and slaughtering Jews and Christians, they have followed the commands of their religion of peace and thoroughly enjoyed putting one another, Shia and Sunni, to the sword.  Or IED.  And now because of the historical illiteracy of the Bush administration, we have deployed innocent young Americans to protect these people from their own imbecilic ferocity.  Furthermore, even as our troops go about their work, they’re being targeted by the people they’re trying to save.  Hurt lockers don’t come more painful than this.

Coming abruptly into the war in media res, Bigelow’s camera introduces us to the EOD squad patrolling Baghdad’s shattered streets.  There’s Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), Sp. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), and their new leader, SSgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) who has come to replace the squad’s late leader, a casualty of an IED that went off before he could get away from it.  (All the actors are relatively unknown, which helps them be all the more convincing.  It doesn’t hurt either that each is quite talented, especially Renner, who seems to have been born for his role.)  James is the kind of soldier that commanders love and colleagues loathe.  He’s utterly fearless in the execution of his job.  He’s done it so often—Boal has reported that EOD squads defuse ten to twelve bombs per day—that he’s become recklessly self-assured.  There’s no bomb he won’t approach, no tangle of detonator wires he won’t pick apart.  While the others maintain anxious surveillance, he goes about his precarious work with a big can-do American smile.  He’s undoubtedly skilful and has the aplomb to think clearly under enormous pressure.  What’s more, he thoroughly enjoys tinkering with the bombs as if they were particularly ingenious puzzles.  But his men know that the only reason he’s still breathing is his seemingly inexhaustible fund of dumb luck.  Coming upon a car laden with hundreds of pounds of explosives wired to two detonators, a decoy and the real thing, he takes off his padded protective gear.  “If I’m going to die,” he quips, “I’m going to die comfortable.”  Left unsaid but obvious is that there’s no amount of padding that could save him or his subordinates should the bomb go off.  His men look at one another in dismay, the black Sanborn clearly thinking that this cracker is going to get them all killed.  As Sanborn and Eldridge pull back to patrol the perimeter, James takes off the headphones that are supposed to keep him in contact with his men in case they need to warn him of an impending insurgent attack or a cellphone detonation.  He wants to concentrate.  Afterward, the thoroughly frazzled Sanborn takes the liberty of punching James in the jaw to make his displeasure known.  James takes the insubordination in stride.  Rather than bringing Sanborn up on charges, he satisfies himself later that night by engaging Sanborn in a stomach-punching contest, which he wins handily.  James knows he’s a trial to others, but he’s not going to change.  He keeps a box of detonators he’s taken from the bombs he’s defused to remind him of the many times he’s escaped death.  There’s only one device from which he has not fully escaped: the legal document he also keeps in his box of switches and wires.  It proclaims his divorce from the woman who nevertheless continues to live with him when he’s home, along with their infant son.  This man, so intimate with death, has real difficulties with living.

By naming this cheerful bomb technician William James, Boal seems to be signaling that he’s the pragmatist’s pragmatist.  He doesn’t consider why, only how.  When Sanborn asks him why he keeps risking his life, James can only answer, “I don’t know; I don’t think about it.”  His commanding officer loves his attitude.  “You’re a wild man, soldier.  A wild man,” he chortles.  In response, James just beams with aw-shucks pride.  This guy could hardly be more useful to those in charge.  Draft-dodger Dick Cheney would love him to death, if not beyond.

The Hurt Locker doesn’t need to give us the big speech about the futility of war.  Its details say it all.  The film’s climax comes when the squad penetrates an insurgents’ lair.  In the claustrophobic warren of rooms, there are shelves of chemicals and ordnance, a video camera on a tripod evidently to film suicide bombers professing the purity of their motives, and the corpse of an Iraqi boy whom James recognizes.  He had been the feisty kid who was selling pirated DVDs at the American base, a 12-year-old with whom James occasionally kicked a soccer ball about.  What he discovers next and what he does about it will stay with me for a bad long while.

As my friends and acquaintances will energetically attest, I am not a sentimental man.  Nevertheless, there were moments in this film when my eyes smarted with sorrow and anger.  I felt profoundly embarrassed to be an American whose taxes support this wretched enterprise.  Bigelow moves us not with Hollywood heroics but with a series of quietly harrowing scenes that feel incontestably authentic.  Her slow pacing and close observation of ordinary men performing extraordinarily painstaking operations couldn’t be more compelling.  Even her explosions seem utterly convincing—not Hollywood fireballs but ground-shuddering dirt eruptions accompanied by slowly rippling car roofs that shatter and fling paint flecks into the hazy Iraq air.  Filming in Jordan, she took the opportunity to hire actors from among the Iraqi refugees living there.  This film is scrupulously faithful to things as they are.  Even its depiction of American civilian life is impressive.  There’s a simply rendered scene near the end in which James, on leave, takes his not-quite-ex-wife to a gargantuan supermarket with their baby.  He wanders into the cereal aisle, where he stares dazedly at the improbable seven-foot-high wall of candy-colored boxed selections that runs from the front to the back of the store.  It’s this wondrous American opulence for which he’s been fighting, a bright display of absolutely non-nutritious freedom of choice.

My only complaint about The Hurt Locker is that it hasn’t been put into wide release.  But perhaps that’s coming.  I think it could draw large audiences.  As well as being a minutely executed autopsy of our misguided Iraq mission, it’s a riveting adventure of brave men putting their lives on the line for their country and one another.  Everyone needs to see this movie.

I wonder if the usual blowhards—Bill O’Reilly and John Podhoretz and their kind—will try to kill Bigelow’s film, denouncing it as a bomb, their favorite trope when discussing all the other Iraq war movies that have incurred their shabbily scripted and perhaps well-paid displeasure.  Or will they dare?  Doing so this time might bring them too close to ordnance that is likely to explode in their comfortable, well-fed faces.

Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story by Benedict Carey, recounting an incident in Mosul.  An American patrol had come upon a parked car in the 120-degree heat.  Two kindergarten-age boys were looking at the Americans through its back window.  When one of the soldiers requested permission to give the boys some water, Sfc. Edward Tierney instinctively commanded his men to fall back.  Seconds later the car exploded.  Shrapnel hit the would-be Samaritan in the face, and shock waves knocked the rest to the ground.  Fortunately, none of the soldiers died, and the Samaritan’s wounds were not that severe.  The boys, however, were gone, almost surely unwitting martyrs to the cause of jihad.  One can only imagine their adult handlers’ grief and anger.  After all, they had failed to lure the ridiculously sentimental Americans into a fatal trap.  Our leaders, thankfully, have no time for tears.  They are too busy selling this war to the public as a peacekeeping necessity.  Some peace.

This article first appeared in the September 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.