The Movie Crash Course

When I reviewed Dr. Strangelove, I mentioned that I’d been traumatized as a child by some TV docudramas that depicted “what a nuclear war would actually be like”. The best-known among them is probably The Day After, an American film; but that film pulled its punches a bit to placate some nervous network executives, and a prim title card at the end of the film stated that the actual outcome of a nuclear war would be much, much worse. The two British films I saw had no such self-censor – When The Wind Blows and Threads, both of which are the absolute bleakest films I have ever seen in my life and I am overwhelmingly grateful to the Little Baby Jesus and all of God’s Angels that neither film is included in this list. Especially Threads – while I absolutely think everyone alive today should see it, I also absolutely refuse to watch it again myself. Once was enough.

So I was surprised – and a bit uneasy – to learn that there was a proto-Threads that made it on the list. The War Game was also intended as a telefilm; an hour-long docudrama taking the form of a news magazine show, complete with on-the-street interviews and talking-heads in studios. Only the topic addressed by this magazine was the impact and aftermath of a limited nuclear strike on the United Kingdom, particularly in Cantebury and Sussex.

And….well. You’ve seen the footage, you’ve heard the reports of the impact of a nuclear strike. Or at least you should have. How the flash of the initial blast can blind you. How the heat from the blast can cause instant third-degree burns and cause furniture to spontaneously combust. How the shock wave can level structures. How the firestorm from the blast sucks up all the oxygen, so even if you’re able to escape burning to death, you still will probably suffocate. How the radiation lingers for weeks afterward. How the casualties are so great that any kind of civil service or social program – first aid, shelter, law and order, food relief – is woefully unprepared, under resourced, under-staffed, and overwhelmed. How the people who do manage to survive the blast and the radiation would probably starve. How even the people who don’t starve have absolutely crippling PTSD. How law and order ultimately breaks down altogether amongst the scant few people left.

Still – and fortunately – it wasn’t as graphic and bleak as Threads, and the “news magazine” format of this film was a very welcome buffer. I also appreciated how the filmmakers seemed to point to how ill-prepared and ill-informed both the regular public and the country’s leaders seemed to be; in one scene, our “roving-reporter” films a man going door to door in a Cantebury street delivering copies of a Civil Defense pamphlet, urging everyone to read it immediately and follow its instructions for building a shelter. The recipients are shocked and alarmed – there’s too much to do, and nowhere near enough time to do it. The “reporter” also speaks with a shopkeeper who sells the various tools needed to construct such a shelter – burlap sacks and sand to make sandbags for shoring up windows, boards and metal sheeting to shore up walls – and asks him the various costs of each item. Then the “reporter” next speaks with a worried-looking woman, asking her how much she has to spend on the shelter. For the amount she has, the reporter says in a voiceover, she can buy about eight burlap sacks and two 3×4’s.

There are no mushroom clouds in this film; no extreme gore. They focus on the smaller details; the reporter gets denied access to a building, and a passing soldier waves him over and confides that the army is burning the corpses inside, as there are too many to bury. A man surveys a list of residents’ names, comparing them to the inscriptions inside a bucket full of wedding rings; it’s a desperate attempt to identify the many, many deceased. Early on, a woman listens as the civil defense tests its air-raid siren, and turns to give the reporter a terrified stare. Towards the end, the reporter speaks to a cluster of sad-looking orphans at a refugee center, asking them what they want to be when they grow up; they all say that they “don’t wanna be nothing”. An exhausted nurse tries to tell the story of a little boy with severe burns she tried to save, but is too haunted by what she’s seen to even finish.

Periodically the “reporter” will cut in to discuss some of what we’re seeing; how Dresden suffered a firestorm very similar to the one we see in the film, and how the Los Alamos team had given them the details about radiation poisoning. The use of rings to identify the dead was something that happened in Dresden as well. And the PTSD and nihilism was something they’d seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And – how some of the Pollyanna pro-nuke statements made by talking heads towards the beginning of the film were also based on actual statements made by British civil servants, scientists, and priests. “I believe that we live in a system of necessary law and order,” one man says, “and I still believe in the war of the just.”

I had to resist the impulse to punch my screen at that.

When BBC producer Peter Watkins showed his finished work to his superiors, they got cold feet and cancelled its broadcast, stating that “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” Instead, they moved it to a movie theater, screening it for three weeks before sending it on to various international film festivals. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1966. It wasn’t until 1985 that it finally appeared on TV – as part of a double-feature with Threads to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

When he originally reviewed The War Game in the 60s, Roger Ebert suggested that we “should string up bedsheets between the trees and show [it] in every public park.” I agree – I think everyone should see this film, as well as its more graphic descendants like Threads. Especially now that the end of the Cold War is a distant memory and Putin and Kim Jung Il have started rattling those sabers again; looking at these sabers and knowing what they could do to us is the best hope for us all.

This film ended up somewhere very, very different from where I thought it was going to go, and left me a little punch-drunk.

Set in 1942, this is a story about the impact of the Third Reich’s “Aryanization” program on occupied Slovakia. Henpecked “Tóno” Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is a carpenter, but is no fan of the local fascist government and has had some unemployment issues. His wife Evelina (Hana Slivková) keeps nagging him to get a job on the crew building a fancy monument downtown, but that would force him to work for his brother in law Markuš (František Zvarík), who’s an officer for the government on top of being a generally smarmy jerk. But Evelina convinces her sister, Markuš’ wife, to pull some strings – and Markuš awards Tóno a job as the manager of the local sewing supply store. The current owner is a Jew, Markuš tells Tóno, and the Aryanization program has been confiscating all Jewish-owned businesses and transferring them to Slovaks.

But when Tóno heads to the shop to take over, he has a little trouble with the current owner – an elderly widow, Rozália Lautmannová (Ida Kamińska). Mrs. Lautmannová is very hard-of-hearing, and also a little fuzzy on reality – she knows nothing of the Aryanization programs, hasn’t heard a thing about the Third Reich, and keeps thinking that Tóno is a customer. Fortunately Imrich, a friend of Tóno’s, comes by while he is trying to explain things to Mrs. Lautmannová and steps in to help. Imrich Kuchár (Martin Hollý Sr.) quietly clues Tóno in that the shop is actually more a fantasy; the whole thing is being secretly funded by donations from the Jewish community to keep Mrs. Lautmannová comfortable in her old age. They stock it with just enough to serve the community’s needs and give her a modest pension, but the business isn’t profitable in the slightest. However, the town’s Jewish leaders have noticed Tóno might be sympathetic to their plight, and are offering to quietly pay him a weekly “salary” as well if he helps them keep up appearances. It seems like the best possible option, so Tóno agrees.

Most of the film deals with this arrangement, and the growing friendship between Tóno and Mrs. Lautmannová. She still doesn’t quite get what he’s doing there; she thinks he’s come to be her assistant, but he’s so inept that she demotes him to “repairman,” asking him to occasionally fix squeaky doors or errant shelves. Tóno also starts repairing all her own furniture as well, and in gratitude she gives him one of her deceased husband’s suits. They gossip over customers; they talk about the neighbor kids. She feeds him lunch every day. Evelina keeps nagging him to “find out where Mrs. Lautmannová is hiding her gold, because she’s a Jew and must have some”, so he quickly learns to hide the truth from her, spending more time just hanging out with Mrs. Lautmannová instead. But all the while, the noose is slowly tightening around the town’s Jews – until the day Tóno goes to collect his secret weekly salary and is told that the authorities are preparing to gather up all the Jews in town on the following morning and “send them off somewhere in boxcars”. Even worse – Imrich is arrested for being a Jewish sympathizer, with Markuš making a public show of him and warning that any other such sympathizers will meet a dire fate. Tóno rushes back to the store to warn Mrs. Lautmannová and urge her to escape or hide or something – but an uncomprehending Mrs. Lautmannová thinks he’s having a fight with his wife and makes up the guest bedroom for him. Tóno reluctantly agrees – the roundup will be taking place in the town square, just across the street from her shop, and he figures he can keep an eye on her that way and figure out what to do when the time comes.

And….that’s when the film turns. I won’t say that much about it; but the half hour “roundup sequence”, in which Tóno panics over “what to do about Mrs. Lautmannová”, was a complete sea change from how the rest of the film was going, and was in turns heartbreaking, harrowing, shocking, and frustrating. I was anticipating some kind of “escape plan” getting cooked up at the last minute – something hare-brained and loopy involving a makeshift costume, or something heroic and adventurous; but you do not get that at all. Instead you get something far more chaotic as Tóno changes his mind – and, sadly, his loyalty – back and forth again and again, for a harrowing half hour.

It’s easy for people today to speculate about “what I would have done to fight Nazis” – usually claiming that why, of course they would have hidden people in their closet or helped them flee town or suchlike. So all those people who just turned away and let it happen – they must have been Bad People! …But until such a thing is literally happening outside your window, you can’t know what you’d really do – and what you’d really do, or at least consider doing, might be morally questionable. This film ultimately felt like a reminder that this ambiguity is very human – and tragic.

David Lean once again excells with his cinematography and music choices for this adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel; and once again, I’m a bit lukewarm about the story itself.

The “Doctor Zhivago” of the title is Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), born in the Ural Mountains but orphaned as a child and taken in by a Moscow family. He grows up to be a doctor, writing poetry in his spare time, and marries his adoptive sister Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). Elsewhere in Moscow, a young woman named Lara (Julie Christie) catches the eye of her mother’s lover, Victor Komarosky (Rod Steiger), who date-rapes her one night after a ball. Her mother attempts suicide when she finds out, and Komarosky calls on his own doctor to discreetly handle the situation. Coincidentally, Zhivago is his assistant, and Lara catches his eye there as well. But Lara really catches his attention when she later turns up at a Christmas party and shoots Komarosky. Komarosky refuses to press charges, Zhivago patches him up, and someone finds Lara’s boyfriend Pasha (Tom Courtenay) and urges him to marry Lara and get her out of town.

But this isn’t just a soap-y plot – this is all happening just before the First World War, at a time when Bolshevik sentiment is also causing trouble within Russia itself. And soon both the War and the Bolshevik Revolution throw even bigger wrenches into our characters’ lives. Pasha enlists and goes missing in action; Zhivago is drafted into service as a field doctor. Lara volunteers as a nurse to try to find Pasha, and is assigned to work with Zhivago; and while sparks fly for them then, they behave themselves, each returning to their separate homes after the war. Only Zhivago’s palatial home has been taken over by the Soviet government and turned into a block of apartments, and the Soviets have been throwing shade at Zhivago’s poems. He soon sneaks out with his family to his father-in-law’s country home in the Urals – just outside the town where Lara coincidentally now lives. This time the pair finally become lovers – except just when Zhivago realizes he needs to decide between Tonya and Lara, he’s kidnapped by a band of Communist soldiers and press-ganged into their ranks for another two years. When he finally escapes and starts heading home, he has an interesting choice – which “home”? Tonya, or Lara?

When the film came out, several critics grumbled that the film markedly diminished the importance of the Russian Revolution and the resulting political fallout. I’m inclined to agree – Zhivago seems to be able to escape Moscow awfully easily, and we get little to no clarification of who the two warring parties are in the Bolshevik Revolution; we just know that there’s the “Red Soviets” and the “White Russians”, but other than that all we know is that they’re making Zhivago sad and complicating things with him and Lara. I was also frustrated by a character played by Alec Guinness; he claims in the film that he is Zhivago’s half-brother Yevgraf, and helps get them out of Moscow at one point, but…mostly he seems to be a convenient plot device and that’s it. I learned nothing about how he was Zhivago’s half-brother, which bothered me greatly for some reason. Pasternak’s book includes more of Zhivago’s thinking about the political foment, but the overwhelming focus of the film is on the Tragic Doomed Romance between Zhivago and Lara, and giving everything else short shrift got me lost a few times.

Fortunately there’s pretty stuff to look at – the grey of a mine shaft punctuated by a Soviet Red Star, Zhivago’s in-law’s abandoned mansion frozen over into a fairytale ice palace, a rare happy moment where Zhivago contentedly looks out at the country field surrounding the house where he and Tonya live to see it covered in newly-blooming daffodills. There’s also the occasional moment of unexpected comedy – early in the film, Yevgraf is talking to a young woman he suspects may be Yuri Zhivago’s daughter with Lara, who went missing as a child. But when he asks her what her mother’s name was, she says “Mummy”, and when he asks what she looked like, she says only, “She….was big?”

I think it really depends what you’re looking for when you go into this. If you’re looking for a complex analysis of a character struggling to find a place for himself and his family between a pair of warring political ideologies, you may not find that here; but if you’re looking for a swoony romantic epic, you’ve definitely got that.

Somehow I feel like this was a perfect film for that weird week that comes between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s a liminal sort of week where there’s no plan and things just sort of meander; a meme I’ve seen discusses how for most of December you’re feeling “festive”, and then in January you’re feeling you indulged a bit much; but for that one week, you’re “confused, full of cheese, and unsure of the day of the week”. There were a lot of good elements to this film, but somehow they didn’t gel, leaving me confused and unsure what I felt.

Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is a young man in Parma, Italy in the 1960s; he’s from a mundane middle-class family, but has been spending a lot of time with Cesare (Morando Morandini), a teacher who’s turned him on to the Communist Party. And Fabrizio’s twenty-something zeal gloms onto that to the point that he’s considering renouncing his parents and his entire way of life up to that point – or, at least, that’s what he tells his best friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) one afternoon. Agostino seems to be troubled himself, but Fabrizio is too caught up in his Grand Life Plan to notice….so he’s taken by surprise when Agostino later drowns himself.

The shock knocks Fabrizio for a loop – which his mother sees as the perfect excuse to Get Fabrizio Some Help. She invites her sister Gina (Adriana Asti) for a visit; Gina is a good deal younger, closer to Fabrizio’s age, and Fabrizio’s parents think that she might be able to get through to him and sort him out. But Gina’s having a hard enough time keeping her own self sorted out. And so, instead of Gina giving Fabrizio some familial advice, the pair start hooking up. It does get Fabrizio’s mind off politics….however, that’s only because now he’s obsessed with Gina. He makes a half-hearted effort to turn her on to politics, introducing her to Cesare and encouraging her to join in their philosophical talk….and he gets jealous when Gina introduces him to an old boyfriend of hers, an older man she calls “Puck” (Cecrope Barilli). Fabrizio causes a scene at their meeting – but it’s unclear whether he’s scornful of Puck’s bourgeoise lifestyle or just jealous over Gina – and ultimately he’s left confused, full of conflicting ideas, and unsure what he believes any more.

So, I could tell that this film was trying to say a lot. And some of those things were indeed thought-provoking; good portions of the film suggest that Fabrizio’s idealism is misplaced and naive, but it’s not clear whether director Bernardo Bertolucci thinks this is a sad happenstance or just the natural way of things. (Although, there’s a late sequence at a Communist Party rally where two girls who are supposed to be handing out leaflets are more caught up in discussing Marilyn Monroe’s recent death, which suggests Bertolucci thinks the latter.) Gina’s situation is also left really frustratingly vague; there’s one scene in which she calls her therapist long-distance, and their emergency one-sided conversation suggests that Gina’s struggling with some fairly intense mental struggles. But – this is the only scene that alludes to that, and we never learn more other than she sometimes feels anxiety and can’t sleep. We never learn why. ….There’s also an uneasy moment right at the end when Gina fawns over Fabrizio’s younger brother in a bit of a creepy way (not that Gina and Fabrizio hooking up was all that fantastic, but at least both were adults).

So ultimately I wasn’t sure what to make of this. It was too good for me to write it off, but too unfocused for me to really sign on; and I simply couldn’t come to grips with it.

Yeah, you know this story – this musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which a phonetics and diction teacher makes a casual bet with a friend that he can pass a Cockney flower girl off as a Duchess simply by giving her a series of elocution lessons – but he does so with little thought to how his pet project will fare after his little experiment is over.

And Audrey Hepburn is perfect as Eliza Doolittle, the flower-girl in question; she’s got the sass and spunk Eliza needs before her transformation, and the regal bearing she needs after. I could always totally buy her in both guises. She also overshadows Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins, the diction teacher seeking to mold her; he’s fine and all, but he’s got the sort of speak-singing habit that makes me dubious. He’s also playing a thoroughly unpleasant fellow to boot; in the original stage musical, as in Shaw’s play, Higgins is an unpleasant and selfish fellow, whom Eliza walks out on at the end. The musical tries to soften things with a happy ending, bringing Eliza back to Higgins after he’s sung an epiphany about how he misses her; but Shaw was opposed to this kind of ending in his original play, and Higgins is unpleasant enough that I didn’t buy it in the musical either.

I found I had a similar to-and-fro reaction to much of the rest of the film as well; loving some elements, repulsed by others. Some of the songs are delightful – I’ve always been fond of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “On The Street Where You Live” (I even sang that latter song to myself one afternoon when a work errand brought me to the block where a new boyfriend lived). And the musical and film both preserve Shaw’s ideas about how providing aid to people needs to be more than just a cosmetic fix-up; and how in some cases it may make them worse off.

That last notion may be the whole point of Eliza’s father, Albert, and his inclusion in the play. But I honestly felt like you could have cut him out entirely without the story suffering at all; he’s absent from much of Eliza’s life, and appears only to sing a couple songs and then wheedle Higgins out of some money. His songs are fine and all, and Stanley Holloway does okay with them, but they could have been cut entirely from the whole thing and I wouldn’t have missed him. This story and this struggle is entirely between Higgins and Eliza, and Albert has little to nothing to do with it.

Also, I simply was bored by everyone’s musical performances save Audrey Hepburn’s – even though, ironically, she wasn’t the one singing; her voice was famously (and unnecessarily) dubbed by Marni Nixon, a singer who often provided the “singing voice” for other actresses in this period (we’ve heard her before in West Side Story as Maria, and we also hear bits of her in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). It may be Nixon’s voice we hear, but it is certainly Hepburn’s performance which sells Eliza’s numbers. Compared to Hepburn, though, everyone else felt stagey and affected.

I realize it sounds like I’m damning this film with faint praise. I didn’t dislike it, though – I was more just lukewarm about it, and felt it went on a little long, with too much time in between Hepburn’s singing. And honestly, that’s one of the biggest reasons I wished they’d cut out Albert’s role – the whole film could have been shortened by a good 20 minutes without him, and I think it might have improved; again, not because Holloway does poorly with the role, but rather because I don’t think the story itself needed to hear from him at all.

There’s an interesting plot lurking in this film. And, I’ve also been intrigued by director Carl Dreyer’s vision in the past. But here it feels like either a weird mismatch, or Dreyer’s style feels like a bit of a throwback.

In Dreyer’s defense, the film world changed around Dreyer dramatically in the nine years since his previous film Ordet, and he’d also been trying unsuccessfully to launch other films in the interim. When his attempts to adapt works by William Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill failed, Dreyer revisited an idea he’d had in the 1940s – adapting a play by Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg. Dreyer settled on Söderberg’s work Gertrud after reading a critic’s analysis pointing out how much of the play was driven by characters settling for trivial conversation instead of genuine communication. Struck by this observation, Dreyer chose to stage his adaptation in such a way that the dialogue was more important than the cinematography.

The problem is that it’s always been Dreyer’s imagery that’s struck me, so in a way he was abandoning his own best quality. The story itself also doesn’t really suit the all-talk approach; it’s a period piece and relationship drama, with Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode) struggling to balance her younger ideals about love with a disappointing reality. She’s currently married to Gustav (Bendt Rothe), a lawyer and aspiring politician, but previously had lived a more bohemian life as an opera singer and lover to esteemed poet Gabriel Lidman (Ebbe Rode). Her life with Gustav is calm, but stifling, and Gertrud shocks Gustav one day by asking for a divorce. Gabriel is in town for a visit, and Gustav assumes she wants to return to him – but actually she’s got her eye on a younger man, a pianist and composer named Erland (Baarde Owe). But that goes to pieces and Gabriel tries to lure her back – prompting Gertrud to finally tell him why she left him, and why she then was leaving Gustav, and why Erland also let her down so.

There’s some really heady stuff in this, and Gertrud is ultimately a tragic character – so caught up in an idealistic vision of What Love Really Is Like that nobody was ever going to satisfy her. Dreyer adds an epilogue to the original play that suggests Gertrud found her way to some happiness in a single life; I’m likely to end up that way myself, and I found that a refreshing change from the usual depiction of “tragically lonely older women”. But Dreyer is still pretty frank about how Gertrud’s monomaniacal commitment to those ideals of love is what leads her to this single life in the first place, and that’s also some food for thought.

The problem is that nearly all the scenes are conversations between pairs of people – Gertrud and Gustav, Gertrud and Erland, Gertrud and Gabriel, Gustav and Gabriel, etc. – with very little action. And nearly all of these conversations are strangely passionless, with neither person looking at each other – everyone seems to stare at some point in the middle distance as they speak, rarely reacting to each other. The most gumption we see from Gertrud is when she’s telling Gabriel about a moment from their old love affair, and we skip to a flashback when she discovers Gabriel’s written something that displeases her – but all she does is angrily rip a piece of paper in half and that’s it. Gustav has a similar moment at one point, Gertrud and Erland kiss a few times, and there’s a weird moment at a party in Gabriel’s honor when a college student delivers a lengthy tribute speech – but mostly it’s just people talking about how disappointed they are with their love lives, but in a tone of voice more suited to talking about how you had to settle for a different kind of cheese because your favorite was sold out.

So ultimately this felt like more of an intellectual exercise than a film.