Category Archives: History

Final Review from 2021: The King’s Man

A prequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The secret Service this film takes place in the run up to and during World War I depicting the events that led to the formation of the private intelligence service.

The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) after serving in and suffering the horror of Victoria’s Little Wars at the end of the 19th century has become a dedicated pacifist providing food and medical aid to the people suffering during wars. (Historical points to the film for showing Brittan’s invention of the Concentration Camp during the Boer War in South Africa. Points the film will later forfeit due to gross historical inaccuracy.) As the world if pushed towards the first global war by a shadowy secret conspiracy Oxford along with his man servant (Djimon Hounsou) his housekeeper (Gemma Arterton) and his adult son (Harris Dickerson) try to foil the plot. When war breaks out Oxford finds that his son doesn’t share his dedication to pacifism and is determined to perform his patriotic duty in the Great War. In order to defeat the conspirators’ plot to destroy England by using Imperial Germany as their pawn Oxford and his people involve themselves in events from Russia to Washington D.C.

I did not care much for Kingsman: The Secret Service but the actors and setting of this film enticed me out to the theater. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, finding the familial drama compelling enough and the adventure entertaining enough to serve as a nice ‘popcorn’ distraction. If you have any real historical knowledge of the Great War and how it resolved, you will need to set it all aside during the film’s third act when everything turns on bringing America into the war to provide the force required to defeat Imperial Germany. Germany was starving by 1918 and was already staring defeat in the eyes. Plus, the filmmakers were forced to sweep aside the Lusitania as a cause for American intervention or else somehow make out heroes responsible for her sinking. Still, if you can ignore history this movie is fun and has a few surprising turns in its plot.

20 Years On

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and flight 93 that is generally assumed to have its target the capital but was thwarted by its passengers at the cost of their own lives.

I remember clearly where I was how I heard about the attacks. At the time I was working an overnight shift at a laboratory that performed drug testing for commercial clients. I loaded and ran a large machine that processed the samples. I was far from a scientist but a worker with basic skills and to help pass the hours I listened to radio during the night. Every night as the dawn came atmospheric changes began interfering with reception and usually, I had to shut off the radio for the last hour or so of my shift. On Sep 11th, 2001, just as the signal was degrading beyond usability, I hear the first reports that a plane has collided with one of the towers at the WTC. I assumed it was probably some light civilian aircraft and heard no more as noise swamped the signal.

At the time I used mass transit to get home and at the bus stop a random person was trying to tell me that a tower had collapsed. At this point I still had no confirmed information that it had been a massive airliner and assumed this person was passing on rumor or speculation. (Even before the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter there was plenty of bad and fake information out there.) When I reached the 7-11 just blocks from my apartment, I saw the video playing on their television and understood that the world had changed.

The Baron of Arizona: A Disappointment Years in the Making

Some years ago, in the before time when streaming wasn’t a common way to locate and see film I chanced upon a fragment of a broadcast of 1950’s The Baron of Arizona, a western starring horror icon Vincent Price.

The film’s central plot, loosely adapted from a historical event, is how James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price) with forged documents nearly swindled the government of the United States out of almost all of the territory of Arizona.

That idea is so grand and so daring that I really wanted to see the film adaptation of it, particularly since it starred Vincent Price and was written and directed by Samuel Fuller. This month The Baron of Arizona is streaming on The Criterion Channel, and I have finally watched it.

It’s hard to remember an anticipated film that disappointed me more than this one. The film about a swindle of nearly unimaginable scale is told with dull plodding voice over and all the excitement of long boring day at work on a Monday. We follow Reavis as he takes the steps to work his forgery and swindle, a globe-trotting series of events that includes infiltrating a monastery to gain access to ancient Spanish records and manipulating a Roma Tribe to gain access to a noble’s library. After putting the grift into operation Reavis faces angry ranchers and locals who look less than kindly upon the man now calling himself their Baron and demanding rent for lands that thought they had own. but even when the plot escalates into action with hurled sticks of dynamite and federal government sending forgery experts to investigate the pace remains glacial and not even Price’s magnetic screen presence can make the movie interesting or compelling.

Movie Review: Dragonwyck

Despite the title the film Dragonwyck is not a fantasy but rather a period drama set in the area around New York and Connecticut during the years of 1844 to 1846.

Gene Tierney plays Miranda Wells a devout Connecticut farmgirl who is asked by distant cousin Nicholas Van Ryn, (Vincent Price) to come live with he and his wife for a while as a companion to

Title: DRAGONWYCK ¥ Pers: TIERNEY, GENE / PRICE, VINCENT ¥ Year: 1946 ¥ Dir: MANKIEWICZ, JOSEPH L. ¥ Ref: DRA005AB ¥ Credit: [ 20TH CENTURY FOX / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]

their eight-year-old daughter. Miranda convinces her religiously strict father to consent, and she leaves the family farm with dreams of see a larger and more exciting world.

Nicholas is estranged from his wife and daughter and rules over his vast estate, Dragonwyck, as a patroon, a Dutch title nearly invalidated by the Revolutionary War and Independence, but Nicholas retains ownership of the land and extracts rents from the farmers living there.

Miranda also meets the handsome young Doctor for the farming community Jeff Turner who is also involved in the Anti-Rent movement seeking to abolish the last vestiges of patroon system. Torn between these two men and their opposing political views Miranda is mired in ancient superstitious familial curses, the growing threat of political violence, and possible murder.

Dragonwyck is an enjoyable melodrama and few actors performed haughty patrician as well as Vincent Price. Though popularly known for his work in the horror genre Price’s gifts as a thespian granted him great range with his stature and demeanor perfectly suited for the doomed nobles.

While not the best example of his work, Dragonwyck is thoroughly serviceable for anyone wanting to experience Price beyond ghosts, ghouls, and ghastly revenge.

The Faux Patriots

I am a child of the Cold War; born the same year the Communist constructed the Berlin Wall. For those who are perhaps too young to know or remember the Cold War was a global struggle between the The West, The United States and her Allies, also called the Free World and The East, The USSR and her client states. (If a nation belonged to neither group it was referred to as the Third World and overwhelmingly these nations were destitute, and that label became synonymous an impoverished country.)

The Free World was hardly perfect. At the start of the Cold War the English still ruled their global Empire and the United States remained a heavily segregated nation with its large black population surviving as second-class citizens. How could this state of affairs justify the honorific ‘Free’?

The answer is that the governments of the Free World were accountable to their people. Even with the stain of America’s Jim Crow laws the free, fair, and open elections in America held the government of the United States answerable to its people. The very fact of that accountability held the seeds to the changes that destroyed Jim Crow and to this day drag us further along the road to actual justice and equality.

The Soviets and their client states held no free, fair, or open elections and were immune, until revolution, from the will of their subjects. This is the essence that separated the West from the East, the crucial factor that drove the Cold War, and fuels decades of conflict, open and clandestine, costing lives and fortunes, and held the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation over the entire world and it is this bedrock foundational principle that the Modern Republican Party has abandoned.

Make no mistake about it. The GOP as it currently stands, wedded and inseparable from Trump and his grifters unwilling to issue a party platform in its most recent presidential election favoring instead to commit itself to the ever-changing messages from its leader, has abandoned free, fair, and open elections. The Republican Party, a party that once defined itself by its opposition to the Soviet Block now openly plats to subvert election and dismiss violent attempts to prevent the transfer of authority because of a free, fair, and open election did not produce the results they desired. This, not corporate tax rates, no abortion, nor gun control, is the defining issue of our time and no person supporting the Republican party has any moral justification in calling themselves a patriot.

And Now for a Good Movie: The Courier

In addition to watching the wretched The Creeping Flesh my sweetie-wife and I also rented The Courier a Cold War espionage thriller starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Set in the early 60s and lead up to the Cuban Missile CrisisThe Courier is based upon historical events and characters and from my Wikipedia level of research seems to have gotten the broad strokes of events correct but as always one should never attempt to learn history from cinema.

Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch) is a British businessman and salesman who frequently travels behind the Iron Curtain. When Penkovsky, a high-ranking member of the Soviet GRU (military intelligence), messages the Americans that he is willing to delivery secrets to them Wynne is recruited by MI6 and the CIA to act as a courier between the agent and the west. Wynne and Penkovsky become close friends and when their operation starts to become exposed Wynn is forced to decide what is the true nature of loyalty.

The Courier is an excellent film that keeps itself ground in the realism of the day. This is no James Bond adventure but more of a John le Carre style story though without the deep and all-encompassing cynicism Le Carre was so fond of. Directed by Dominic Cooke and written by Tim O’Connor The Courier rarely puts a foot wrong, principally keeping us in Wynne’s point of view and conveying the risks and consequences of the characters’ action. Sean Bobbit’s cinematography captures the sense of alien coldness permeating the scenes set in the Soviet Union as Wynne finds himself lost the labyrinth of modern spying.

The Courier is currently in some theaters and available for the ‘Theater at home’ rentals.

Streaming Review: Ragnarök (2013)

As I have commented on with two posting here, I am currently and thoroughly enjoying the Swedish/Danish television co-production of the Nordic Noir series The Bridge. Particularly impressive has been Sofia Helin’s performance as Detective Saga Noren and I went looking for other projects that she appeared in to compare her performances there and that lead me to Ragnarök.

Released in 2013 Ragnarök is a Norwegian monster movie about an archeologist, Sigurd, that follows clues about a Viking voyage to Finnmark in the extreme north of Norway and an abandoned fenced off zone between Norway and Russia where he finds not only the archeological evidence to support his theories but an ancient aquatic beast. Trapped with his two children and a couple of associates Sigurd must discover the nature of the beats and with little supplies and no weapons see everyone safely out of the dark and dangerous forest.

Sofia Helin plays Elisabeth one of Sigurd’s companions and is in a supporting role in the production. While she is given little actual character work to do, she displays that her work in The Bridge is actually from a great deal of range.

Ragnarök itself is a middling film. It is not bad, and it is not great. The action sequences of tense and taut, the plot takes turns that moved it away from predictability. (When they were trapped in the caverns, I fully expected the rest of the film to take place underground, but both the characters and the writers were more inventive than that.) The cinematography is lovely, fully capturing the deep and isolating wilderness the characters find themselves trapped in while the special effects for the monster are credible and still hold up eight years later which cannot be said about many higher budgeted productions.

The film’s failings are that as a dramatic story there is not enough meat on the bones of the character’s conflict to drive a full feature and as a monster movie the beast arrives too late in the story. The ‘monster movie’ elements of Ragnarök takes place entirely in the films third act and while well-paced and well thought out the late arrival of the film central premise damages the final product.

Still, I do no regret taking the time to watch this film and at a scant hour and a half it doesn’t require a massive commitment.

Ragnarök in Norwegian with English subtitles is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Streaming Review: The Dig

The Dig is a dramatization of the discovery of a 6th century burial ship on an English estate by a self-trained archaeologist, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and the estates owner the widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan.) The movie details their struggles with acceptance, resistance from the accredited community, and deteriorating health all as England the world plunge into the cataclysmic horror of the Second World War.

This is a quiet, sedate, drama without anyone pulling a weapon or even raising their voice and it still crackled with tension as the characters faces trials and tribulations. It is a perfect example of that uniquely British style of drama that is motivated by class and manners, where the stakes are defines by expectations and the cost of defying them. In years past The Dig would have played to great success on the silver screen but not only due to the pandemic but also changing audience patterns niche channels and streaming services are now the home for this sort of dramatic fare. The truth of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay more than twenty dollars a piece for non-spectacle cinema. That is not a slight on spectacle films but rather an acceptance that audiences have changed.

The performances in The Dig are superb. Fiennes adopts a Suffolk accent that is simply charming, Mulligan radiates sympathy a widowed wife facing not only the challenge of raising a son alone with also while dealing with a terrible condition all without ever devolving into maudlin pits of self-pity. The supporting cast is equally talented including Lilly James as a young archaeologist faced with sexism from academia and the horror that she has married the wrong man.

Cinematographer Mike Eley captures haunting and lovely images of the English country giving the fog a ghostly and timeless luminosity that feels as though it has passed through the centuries with the buried burial site.

Screenwriter Moira Buffini’s script shows a deft competence and subtilty that trusts the audience to understand the situation and the characters’ inner lives and motivations without needlessly wordy exposition.

Under the helm of Director Simon Stone all of these elements come together for a moving portrait of people and an age that has now passed.

The Dig is streaming on Netflix.

Reagan’s Party is Dead

Love him, loath Him, or be utterly indifferent to him there’s no denying that Ronald Reagan stood at the head of a massive movement in American Politics. Where Goldwater failed Reagan succeeded at seizing the Republican from the ‘Rockefellers’ and made it into the American Conservative Party. Ever since his victory over Carter in 1980 and his follow-up unprecedented 49 state crushing of Mondale in 84 Reagan has been the standard and the platonic ideal for every GOP national candidate until Trump.

The horrid truth, I think it is horrid no matter from where you approach it on the political spectrum except as a Trumpist is that Trump now commands the GOP more than Reagan.

In 1980 Reagan won nearly 44 million votes, about 19% of the entire American population supported him. 1984’s titanic victory came with Reagan winning 54.5 million votes and increasing the percentage of the population that supported him to 23%. (These percentage are of all people in the United States not just those eligible or just those who bothered to vote.)

With the 2016 election while losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college Trump gathers 62.9 Million votes, about 19% of the total population, comparable to Reagan’s popularity with more raw votes.

This year’s election the results are looking like Trump increased his vote total to 74.1 million votes representing a popular support of about 22% very nearly the same as Reagan’s but with a fanatical base of support willing to discount actual facts about the election outcome and equally willing to jettison decades of conservative positions for personal loyalty to Trump.

It has been 32 years since the GOP’s idol occupied the White House and with Trump his ghost has been exorcised from the party. The first real test of Trump command of the party and its candidates will come next month when we see how many national Republicans are willing the incur the child-king’s by attending the Inauguration of the new president.

My 9-11 Memories

While 2020 seems an endless treadmill of terror the 19 years between today and 2001 seem like a flash that passed with the swiftness of a hummingbird’s dive.

September 2001, I worked the overnight as a specimen processor at Quest Diagnostics. I ran a machine that took very little active thought and throughout the night usually listened to a ‘boom box’ tuned to a local radio station. One the morning of September 11th, as often happened, the radio’s reception turned spotty and the station alternated between clear signal and migraine inducing static. Just before reception failed entirely, I heard a breaking news report that an aircraft had apparently collided into the World Trade Center.

My first thoughts were that some light general aviation aircraft had lost its way and slammed into the building much like in 1949 when a B-25 Mitchell had struck the Empire State Building. Tragic, people had died, but not a monumental news story.

Unable to get any further news I completed my shift and left for home. At the bus stop, in those years I was bound by mass transit, a young man listening to a handheld transistor radio with a single earpiece pushed into his ear said that one of the towers had fallen.

I did not believe him but kept quiet. So often in the immediate moments after something breaks on national news there are rumors and exaggerations and still with no knowledge of what exactly had happened, I was disinclined to believe the most sensationalist version of events.

Disembarking from my bus I stopped off at a 7-11 on the way back to my apartment and on the televisions playing in the store saw the horrible truth. In that moment it changed from being a ‘news story’ to history we were living through. I called friends and woke them up and as the day passed dread for our future grew.

Since that day, September 11th, 2001, we have been in constant war. Thousands lost their lives and it’s difficult to assess that we have made any meaningful progress since then. The culprits directly responsible have mostly been dealt with but the underlying conditions have scarcely changed and the toll it has taken on our national character, it opened the door for American to be known as a nation that tortures prisoners, it incalculable.

It is no test to be moral when times are good the test is when anger burns the blood, when vengeance enflames the mind, that is when the test truly comes and people discover who you really are.

It is up to us to change the tense of that verb, from who we are to who we were.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur