Christopher East

Certainly not for the first time nor the last, we’re back to World War II for Hangmen Also Die! (1943), which comes with a considerable pedigree, what with Fritz Lang at the helm and Bertolt Brecht contributing to the script.  Despite some indisputable espionage trappings, I’d probably classify this more as a wartime drama than a “pure” spy film, but it’s certainly satisfying – if not entirely enthralling – on both counts.

If the era is well trodden, the geography is not:  the setting is Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, for a change, in 1942, at the height of Nazi dominance in Europe.  The Czech resistance strikes a blow for the Allied cause by assassinating infamous Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich, sinister figurehead of the German “protectorate.”  Fleeing the scene, one of the Czech assassins, Dr. Franticek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy), finds himself in a tight spot when his getaway car is forced away by a German patrol.  By sheer chance, young Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee) finds herself in the position to misdirect the German forces searcing for him – much to her later regret, as it turns out.  Svoboda – with no other options – later seeks refuge in her home.  Reluctantly Mascha and her father, a respected profesor and political leader (Walter Brennan), shelter the assassin just as the incensed authorities are ramping up their retaliatory crackdown on the Czech populace.  When Professor Novotny is rounded up by the Nazis, as one of 400 political prisoners ultimately used in a ploy to lure out the assassin, Mascha finds herself in a horrifying position, watching her father suffer for the heroic “crime” of a Czech patriot, and having to make dark, impossible decisions about which of them to save, and why.

Hangmen Also Die! is a dark, intense drama that doesn’t pull its punches — by the standards of its time, at any rate.  It’s a grim depiction of cold-hearted Nazi brutality, and a rousing tribute to those who lost their lives to combat tyranny, often paying the greatest possible price.  By contemporary standards the film is somewhat slow and unwieldy, clearly the product of a more patient filmgoing era.   Or perhaps in its faithfulness to history, it overextends itself a little; the story mutates from a suspenseful manhunt into another kind of film altogether as, later on, the Czech underground works to turn the tables.  But it’s certainly an effective film, and one that doesn’t shy away from its subject matter.  Lang’s direction is crisp and stark, and there’s a sober, noir flavor to the proceedings, particularly in its realistic, unglamorized violence.  The performers are adequate, if unspectacular, and at the end of the day, the story closes satisfyingly.

In the overall scheme of the genre, my guess it that Hangmen Also Die! would be a pick for completists only, particularly those with more patience for the talky rhythms of older movies.  But students of history, both of the era and of film, will find plenty worth investigating here.

Here’s another eclectic piece of foreign cinema for you:  The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), a historical drama documenting the rise and fall of a controversial left-wing terrorist organization in Germany during the turbulent sixties and seventies.  Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) is a left-leaning journalist whose writings put her in the path of activists Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Gudrun Esslin (Johanna Wokalek).  These descendents of the Nazi era have shifted to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, and in protest of conservative government and American imperialism, they begin bringing awareness of Third World wars to the streets of western democracy.  At first a passive advocate for the cause, Meinhof risks her life and family to contribute hands-on to the group’s wild terrorist behavior, to considerable political effect and great personal consequence.

Slickly produced and well performed, The Baader Meinhof Complex is an interesting window into a troubled era, from a unique and different German perspective.  Essentially a group biopic, the film suffers somewhat from “biopic-itis,” in that it sacrifices narrative shape in the name of historical accuracy — something difficult to criticize, but that makes the film a bit of a slog, particularly in the later going.  The cast is uniformly good, but only Wokalek stands out.  I wouldn’t recommend this one to the casual viewer, but those intrigued by the era and the political angle may find it worth investigating.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is one of the more thematically interesting and artfully shot selections on the Spy 100 list.  In fascist Italy in the days leading up to World War II, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a humorless, apolitical man who — in order to shed a dark past and the stigma of his wealthy, disfunctional family — becomes a conformist.  He marries empty-headed, beautiful young Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) and joins the fascists, working for the secret police.  Then Clerici is given a mission:  to travel to Paris, where he’s to assassinate Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), a former teacher of his  whose anti-fascist leanings are considered troublesome to Mussolini’s regime.  Clerici coldly folds this assignment into his honeymoon, but soon finds himself attracted to Quadri’s young, tough, left-leaning wife Anna (Dominique Sanda).  Clerici’s new fascist allegiance and desire to fit in with the people in power is challenged by the Quadris’ liberal tendencies, and Anna’s carefree, implied bisexuality — “abnormalities” that dredge up Clerici’s powerful internal struggle with being different in a world torn apart by group-think ideology.

Despite the outward political trappings, The Conformist feels less like a spy movie than a historical character study, using the upside-down world of mid-20^th century Europe as a lens through which to view one man’s all-consuming personal battle to reconcile his sense of self with the pressures of societal uniformity surrounding him.  The story-telling is alinear and challenging, but the pieces all add up to a quite satisfying, pointed ending.  The direction and cinematography are top-notch; Bertolucci’s use of color and his shot composition are striking and gorgeous, and in the late-going there’s a sequence of real, gut-wrenching suspense.  But for all its attractive scenery and twisty story points, this is a film about identity, and Trintignant brings off an intriguing performance of repressed inscrutability, both sympathetic and contemptible.  The final, haunting image of him sends a focused, powerful message.   Excellent film.

By chapter three of Inglorious Basterds (2009), it occurred to me that I’d gone into the movie wanting to dislike it.  I really enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s early work, right up to Jackie Brown, but he started to lose me right after that — Kill Bill in particular really exhausted my patience.  Part of me was expecting this one to be another excessive, unrestrained, self congratulatory visual feast of empty calories.

Well, Inglorious Basterds is still occasionally excessive, unrestrained, and self congratulatory, it’s definitely a visual feast, but it’s not remotely empty, and I loved it.  The movie has nothing to do with the old Italian action pic from which it liberated its title, except for the WWII setting.

There’s no real high-concept summary here.  There’s a group of brutal Jewish-American resistance fighters working behind the lines in  occupied Europe, headed by hilariously drawly Brad Pitt, spreading terror throughout the Reich with their Nazi-killing atrocities.  There’s a gloriously awful German colonel, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), and a young Jewish woman, Shoshana Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who escaped his clutches.  There’s a British secret agent on a mission (Michael Fassbender) and a beautiful German film star (Diane Kruger) working against Hitler’s regime.  And there’s a German propaganda film, a small theater in Paris, and cameos galore by the German high command.  Like Tarantino’s best work, the film plays out in a series of a shorter stories, all interconnected.  And as it all builds up, you just hope it’s going to pay off.

It does, in ever unexpected and occasionally shocking ways.  While it’s a war film and a spy film and a historical film, what struck me most about it is the sheer suspense — scenes that start quietly are always rife with tension and escalate in unsettling ways.  It also manages to be, by turns, dead serious and hilariously funny, without ever feeling like a distracting tonal clash — the elements just work together.

My admiration for the film isn’t entirely unconditional.  Sometimes implying violence is just as effective as graphically depicting it, but you’ll never convince Tarantino of that.  There are moments of distractingly anachronistic music; one sequence in particular struck me as a “look at this cool song I like!” decision.  And at times the film, which is generally incredibly immersive, becomes less so by drawing conspicuous attention to its technique.

But I guess it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie if there weren’t lots of unusual filmic choices to quibble over.  In the end, Inglorious Basterds is a pretty amazing film that nobody else could have made.  And really that’s kind of the best reason to watch his movies.  Somtimes it’s much more fun and rewarding to occasionally argue with a perverse filmmaker than always agree with a more conventional one.

Tarantino’s won me back…for now, ayway!

Film auteurs with impressive artistic track records often seem to get away with things that other directors can’t, the relaxed oversight afforded by their names making for more indulgent film-making.  Such is the case, I think,  with Spike Lee in his recent WWII epic, Miracle at St. Anna (2008), which I found to be an interesting, flawed, and yet powerful movie.  It’s a structural mess, and I felt at first that it needed a ruthless editor…but I’m also kind of glad it didn’t get one, for however imperfect the film may be, I suspect it’s much more interesting for being so all over the place.

Based on a novel by James McBride (who also scripted), Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four soldiers — played by Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, and Omar Miller Benson, all very good — from one of the first black combat units to serve in the U.S. Army.  The four men get trapped behind enemy lines during an aborted offensive into northern Italy in 1944.  Surrounded by German forces, the unit finds itself torn in several different directions:  by a young, shellshocked boy who befriends them, by the local Italian civilians, by their own distant, bigoted white officers, and by the anti-fascist partisans in the area.

It all adds up, if somewhat clumsily, to a tragic tale of heroism and sacrifice, with some real heart to it.  But oh, how many problems I had with it along the way.  The largest issue is that it seems to be trying to be too many films at once:  an action epic, a flashback mystery, a love triangle, a tragic history lesson, and a tale of spying and betrayal, among others.   The film shifts gears constantly, with the central heroes disappearing from the stage for long, momentum-killing side plots, unexpected tangents to the German and partisan points of view…there’s a flashback framing device connecting the men to a crime committed in 1983…a flashback within a flashback to the unit’s training…you get the idea.  It’s all connected, which is all to the good, and most of it even amounts to something, but the elements are joined pretty haphazardly.

Lee’s visual sense is as distinctive as ever, and if there are a few self-consciously artsy, slow motion shots trying too hard, there are also plenty of striking images and gorgeous vistas.  Most welcome is the forgotten history of the film:  indeed, steeped as I am in World War II lore, the broader texts don’t generally tell you much about the Buffalo Soldiers who served in combat (certainly central to Lee’s interest), nor do they focus on the late 1944 campaigning in northern Italy (largely dealt with as a sideshow to the France invasion, historically).  The politics and the historical detail — from the attitudes of the war-weary Italian civilians, to the fatalistic German soliders struggling to take their adamant, deluded officers seriously, to the racism in the American armed forces — all feels very authentic and accurate.  Lee tends to pound home his racial message with a heavy, blunt instrument at times, but it doesn’t make that message any less important or necessary.  At the same time, it’s unfortunate that a film so concerned with equality would so dismissively treat its female characters — represented chiefly by Valentina Cervi, as an Italian civilian who becomes a divisive love triangle point among the men, one of the film’s less necessary subplots.  Sadly, this isn’t that uncommon in war films, but you would hope for more here.

So yes, there’s a lot going on in this one — ultimately, I think too much — but some of it is quite good, and its many odd choices make it a consistently surprising and interesting film.  Moreover, it’s winningly heartfelt, and I have to admit that it’s final moments got me.  Obviously with reservations, but I’d recommend it, especially for history buffs.

James Morrow’s previous two novels, The Last Witchfinder and The Philosopher’s Apprentice, are both highly intelligent and challenging books, wonderfully detailed and funny, and bursting with the author’s boundless enthusiasm for his material.   In both cases, that material is at the academic and intellectual end of the spectrum — at times, I felt like some of the jokes would have benefited from an advanced degree in history or philosophy — but for me, the unusual territory was a big part of the fun.  Morrow’s work is ever thought-provoking, and I’ll gladly stretch out of my comfort zone to see what he has to say.

Morrow’s latest release — a short novel entitled Shambling Towards Hiroshima (2009) — feels like a relaxing, breezy read by comparison.  The subject matter is no less esoteric, and just as thematically serious, but the milieu is somewhat more welcoming to the casual reader.  It’s the story of Syms K. Thorley, a noted creature-feature actor of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and his participation in a military project to bring an early end to the war against Japan in 1945.  Told in flashback from Thorley’s seedy Baltimore hotel on the night he’s received a lifetime achievement award from a science fiction convention, it tells the tale of his recruitment into a U.S. Navy biological weapons project to…well, to unleash giant lizards against the Japanese mainland, in order to head off a more conventional invasion and its requisite military casualties.  This initiative, a covert rival of the Manhattan Project, quickly turns into a collaboration between the Navy and Hollywood, and makes for a compelling, amusingy absurd, but ultimately powerful tale.

At a brisk 170 pages, Shambling Towards Hiroshima is tightly constructed, and engagingly recaptures the L.A. of the 1940s from the Hollywood Hills to the inland deserts.  Since this is a secret history — not an alternate one — the ending is never really in doubt, of course:  we all know which war-ending military project wins the race.  But Morrow’s witty and enjoyable narrative succeeds despite the inherent spoiler, making the ride enjoyable enough that the somewhat predictable result is not a detriment.  He also absolutely nails the required absurdist tone to make his Godzilla plot work, so that the book is at once a lovingly crafted homage to the low budget sci-fi films of a bygone era, and a serious and elegiac look back at the unfortunate path of actual history.  Morrow masterfully brings all the loopy, comical build-up to a surprisingly sobering and powerful conclusion.

One benefit of seatback entertainment-on-demand on a long flight:  with all that time to kill, you can take a chance on something you might not normally spend time on.  I picked The Edge of Love (2008) because, although it looked a bit heavy on the romance (not my favorite genre), it seemed to contain elements I might like:  a historical drama with a  biopic angle, set during World War II — and, as a kicker, plenty of eye candy in the cast.  What could go wrong, eh?

Well, it could be frightfully boring.  And The Edge of Love kind of is.

It seems that, long in the film’s past, poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) had a passionate affair with singer Vera (Keira Knightley).  They meet years later during the Blitz, but now Dylan is married to the sassy Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and also has a son.  It appears that Dylan and Vera aren’t quite over each other, a fact that quickly becomes an open secret among the three of them.  But when Vera and Caitlin hit it off as friends, they all move in together, openly acknowledging the love triangle.  Meanwhile, Vera resists the advances of handsome young officer William (Cillian Murphy), until finally she briefly gives up on her love for Dylan and submits…and then there’s a whirlwind romance, a marriage, a boy is shipped off to war, there are hard times, and an affair…

You get the idea.  If you haven’t seen this movie, you’ve probably seen one like it:  tortured romance, unrequited love, longing glances, beautiful women falling all over the wrong guys, affairs, striking young men transformed and haunted by their war experiences, arrogant artistes acting like entitled jackasses, etc.  It’s not badly executed, it’s just not very interesting.  The acting is nicely done, generally — Miller is particularly charming, and Murphy has strong moments.  It also has a rather nice final scene.  But there’s just not enough here to warrant a very strong recommendation.  Other movies have done The Edge of Love, better.

Toward the end of our week, Jenn and I organized a quick day-trip to London.  We traveled by train from Leeds to Kings Cross Station in London, then navigated the Underground down to our insanely huge and extravagant hotel, the Royal Horseguards:

This is in a very touristy area, well within easy walking distance of the Thames, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, scads of museums and theaters and historic buildings, and countless other attractions.  We visited as many of them as we could in our two half-days.  Photos from London:

Here’s Jenn, taken along the Thames with the Eye in the background.

The obligatory red phone booth pic.

A highlight for me was out visit to the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.  Here they’ve restored the bunker from which the Churchill government directed the war effort during WWII.  Audio handsets conveniently describe each exhibit so you can tour at your own pace.  My favorite room was the map room:

Don’t worry, those are mannequins…they’re not still taking shelter from the Blitz. 

Here’s an enigma machine.  This is just wicked cool, and the accompanying display was even cooler.  It’s a really, really good museum if you’re interested in the subject and you get the chance.

Above is the marquee for the Criterion, where we saw The 39 Steps. It’s an enjoyable stage recreation of the Hitchcock film, very clever and meta, with four actors playing all the roles.  The suspense setpieces were creatively and amusingly recreated…

One more of Jenn, in the shadow of a huge monument near Piccadilly (not sure which one this is).  We jam-packed our time in London and I still don’t think we did a fraction of a percent of all the things there were to do…awesome trip!

Sometimes the source material for films about historical figures can handcuff them dramatically — truth stranger than fiction, perhaps, but not as structurally satisfying.  Breach (2007) isn’t exactly a biopic, but it is based on the true story of notorious FBI spy Robert Hanssen.  By focusing on the case that brought him to him to justice, rather than the entirety of his life, it avoids the usual pitfalls of biopics while still delivering the interesting insights into its central figure that biopics demand.  It’s also a cracking good, authentic espionage yarn.

The story opens when young FBI recruit Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillipe) is pulled off terrorist surveillance by hard-nosed agent Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) for a special assignment.  O’Neill is to become the assistant for an old FBI hand, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), in the establishment of a new department ensuring the IT infrastructure of the Bureau.  Hanssen is under suspicion for sexual deviance and Burroughs wants O’Neill to watch and report on his every move…but it quickly becomes clear that something much bigger is going on, and that O’Neill has become a major part of it.

The mystery here isn’t so much “what did Hanssen do?” as it is “why did he do it, and how did they catch him?”  I thought the film suceeded brilliantly in answering both questions.  Central to the appeal of the film is Cooper’s brilliant performance as Hanssen, bringing the notorious spy vividly to life.  Patriotic, cantankerous, religious, smart, slimy, and formidable, Cooper is unforgettable in the feature role.  And crucially, the script provides him every opportunity to elicit a fascinating psychological portrait of this complicated traitor, which is essential to understanding his motives.  As for the “how” of the case, it’s a subtly unfolding mystery that quickly accelerates into a suspenseful operation of realistic intelligence-gathering, and quite satisfying in its own right, perfectly clocked and well produced.  The acting is quite strong at all key points, with Phillipe and Linney both very effective, and able support coming from an impressive supporting cast that includes Gary Cole, Caroline Dhavernas, Dennis Haysbert, and Kathleen Quinlan.  It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of this kind of story.

This one’s been on my to-read shelf for a few years, and while I started it a couple times over that span, it never quite got its hooks into me. Now that I’ve finally read it through, I feel a bit foolish for having waited so long. Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005) isn’t just a good book, it’s a pretty amazing one, an insightful, haunting, funny, and tragic story with politics, history, faith, science and time travel, among many, many other things. There is a lot going on in this one.

In 2003, three key scientists from the Manhattan Project (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard) mysteriously awaken in the contemporary world, spirited forward in time as alternate versions of themselves, spawned at the moment of the first nuclear bomb test. Eventually they converge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they become entangled in the lives of a young couple, Ann and Ben. They find themselves in the curious position of being able to research their own life stories, and — more importantly — the consequences of their world-changing work. Their studies put everything they know into a strange new context, and a harrowing new perspective.

It’s a slow-building novel that picks up speed and wins you over, as the trio first assimilates to their situation, and then — with the patient, often bemused help of their modern hosts — comes to learn all they can about the post-WWII era they’ve helped create, a sobering journey of discovery that moves them ultimately to action. But as their crusade to promote nuclear nonproliferation is appropriated first by naïve but well meaning peaceniks, and later by despicable religious wack jobs, it increasingly becomes clear that the times have changed on them, and their faith in the power of reason will be tested.

There is so, so much going on in this book, it’s kind of hard to know where to start. At times it feels like a quirky, amusing Jim Jarmusch film, at others like a madcap Monty Python scenario. It’s simultaneously science fiction and fantasy and mainstream and historical fiction. By turns it’s a biting satire, a sobering history lesson, a thoughtful character study, an angry political screed, a platonic romance…and I still don’t think I’ve covered it. But I think its most powerful aspect is the intriguingly depicted culture shock central to the scientists’ situation. These are three remarkable men, whose legends were made during truly trying and historic times, and casting their old-fashioned natures and reasoning and values against a vastly incongruous post-9/11 backdrop proves at once enlightening, hilarious, and disturbing. Millet does a fantastic job bringing these three famous figures to life — Szilard’s child-like pretentious can-do attitude, Oppenheimer’s stately reason and charm, and Fermi’s haunted thoughtfulness — while Ann and Ben serve as sympathetic and realistic modern viewpoint characters, searching for meaning in the wake of their unexpected and bizarre circumstances.

It took some work for me to get started on this one, and there are moments — particularly in the third section, I think — where the pace bogged down a bit. I doubt it will be to everyone’s tastes, but for me, ultimately, it proved to be a highly enjoyable, thought-provoking, and rewarding read.