MASTER AND COMMANDER:
Master and
Commander is set in a time when men on sailing ships circumnavigated the globe without
the benefit of GPS, reality TV or anesthesia, but somehow they managed, and even fought battles
which decided the fate of nations.
Russell
Crowe is the titular “master and commander” of a Royal Navy frigate, while Paul Bettany is the ship’s doctor. There’s plenty of fighting, this is, after all, the Napoleonic
Wars. But men also do scientific stuff and advance humanity, exploring remote islands and intellectualizing about their findings.
One is reminded of the Star Trek the Original Series in the movie's balance of military and scientific matters. There's
a great scene where the ship's officers are carousing around the dinner table in a manner which would have weaker souls running
in tears for their therapists.
MOBY DICK (1956)
There's a scene in here in which the Pequod's
whale hunters take to four small boats, chase after a pod of whales any of whom could easily smash them to pieces, and in
a running battle kill several. Now, what makes this so incredible are a couple of things. One is that here we have men on
the high seas hunting literal leviathans and triumphing. Another is that this is like watching the wormriders in the movie
Dune (reviewed elsewhere on this site), except that it really happened!
It’s the sort of thing that men do. I don’t mean merely kill big animals (and we must see the White Whale
here as a symbol). Rather, they take on the most extreme situations that nature can toss at them and treat the challenges as if they were everyday affairs.
Moby Dick is about a lot of things. It's an adaptation of Herman Melville's 1851 novel about obsession as Captain Ahab (Gregory
Peck) chases after the eponymous white whale. But it is also about men coming together to complete a mission, even when that
means going beyond their original mundane purpose (bringing back whale oil) and changing it to something higher--or infernal,
depending upon your take on the story.
Along the way, there is conflict between Ahab
and Starbuck (Leo Genn), the latter trying to keep the expedition on its original track. There's some good debate in there
about the nature of duty, and the obligations owed the folks back home versus those involved with the male warband. We see
men of all races coming together on the ship Pequod, defined by what they do and not who they are. Everyone, from the elite
of harpooneers to the ship's carpenter down to the cabin boy have their functions. It's teamwork at its best. Richard Basehart,
as Ishmael, narrates the tale as a sort of eternal wanderer who alone survives the final confrontation with the White Whale
(ironically, he would later star in the television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). There's even a cameo
by Orson Welles.
The movie was written by science fiction mastermind
Ray Bradbury. I actually saw him lecture once on how he came to write it. After an initial writer's block, he turned in a
stunning screenplay, in which every scene has meaning. He even added some material which improved on the book, a rare enough
event for Hollywood. For example, the final
scene in which "Ahab beckons" adds a level of profundity to the proceedings, and is nicely set up by a scene back in port
when the “prophet” Elisha foreshadows doom. Yet the men are not to be deterred, with Starbuck declaring at the
final confrontation that they are whaling men and they shall hunt whales.
OK, in the end, they just about all end up
dead. But they would have been dead by now anyway, and this way they accomplished great things. Better that than staying in
safe port and saying "what might have been".
There have been a couple of other film versions
of Moby Dick. One was a 1930 travesty in which Ahab not only kills the White Whale (!) but also comes home to marry
his sweetheart. Gimme a break! Then there was the 1998 television movie with Patrick Stewart (of recent Star Trek: the
Next Generation service). This version almost worked. Almost. But the script was kind of weak, the conflict between Ahab
and Starbuck doesn't seem convincing, and we see some characters set up (such as a trio of mysterious harpooneers that Ahab
recruits) who are never brought to life. Still, there are some impressive scenes, such as the crew of the Pequod using gunpowder
to blast its way through the Antarctic ice pack in which their ship has become stuck. The great thing about this scene is
that this is what men really did in those great days.
ZULU:
Michael Caine, Stanley Baker, and a company of British infantry
take on the Zulu army in colonial Africa. It’s based on a true action during the 1879
Zulu War, the Defense of Rorke’s Drift, in which a hundred or so British soldiers defended a mission station against
several thousand Zulu warriors fresh from their victory against another British army. But the movie is really a study of men
who, regardless of race, face impossible obstacles, establish comradeship, and triumph.
Interestingly enough, the grandson of the real war's Zulu King
Cteshwayo was a technical advisor on the movie and he recommended the ending in which the Zulus salute the British as
fellow warriors. (By the way, Zulu Dawn was made some time later and covers the same war, though with an antiwar
stance.)
THE SEARCHERS:
John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter search the West for a girl kidnapped
by Indians. Their journey takes us through many of the Western genres with many an original look at it all: hardy
pioneer families, sweeping vistas, corrupt officials, hardfighting cavalrymen, and the Indian civilization that was both
a fierce foe and yet perilously on the brink of coming to an end. It’s a classic tale of men sacrificing themselves
for their families but creating in themselves something new.
KHARTOUM
There's a rather famous painting depicting the last moments
of Charles "Chinese" Gordon confronting Mahdist forces in the governor's palace in Khartoum when the city fell to an assault
in January of 1885. The painting and the story behind it used to be a favorite of English schoolboys, showing the epic moment
of one man standing alone and triumphing even in defeat. Khartoum is a move which culminates with a depiction of
this event. It stars Charlton Heston as the British officer-mystic whom London sent to the Sudan in 1884 to try to salvage
something in the face of a holy war waged by the Mahdi, a charismatic Islamic rebel leader.
Khartoum is what used to be called a "thinking
man's epic." Historical events unfold in a somewhat plodding manner and there is a lot of verbiage. But there is also
a lot of thought behind the character of Gordon who takes command of the besieged city of the title, brings order out
of chaos, and then manipulates events such that even though he is surrounded in a city in the heart of the Sudan, he
can still control events back in Britain.
Sir Laurence Olivier plays the Mahdi with complexity and
refinement. One can see an austere man who nonetheless has a full understanding of the world beyond his horizons. Some
people might object to an English actor as the Mahdi, but then again, the movie has an American actor playing Gordon!
In any event, one of the Mahdi's descendents apparently saw the film and gave a nod of approval. There are a couple of scenes
in the film where Gordon and the Mahdi meet. While ahistorical, they nonetheless show two great minds, two different outlooks
on the world, confronting each other.
It might be useful to read a quick history of the Mahdist
uprising to get a better sense of the campaign, though the movie outlines it quite well. Khartoum has some nice portrayals
of figures such as Gladstone, Wolseley, the Khedive, and Kitchener, the latter who would go on to retake Khartoum thirteen
years after it fell.
As I said, the direction is somewhat lackluster. The battle
scenes are cut and dried, but in a sense they work because when it came down to it, battles in the era of European imperialism
were cut and dried affairs. As is depicted on screen, disciplined European firepower could cut down the "natives", but then
if the discipline or the firepower failed, the natives could overrun the line. In any event, the real battle in Khartoum
is between the two great men--or perhaps of two great men and the lesser mortals who surround them.
GUNGA DIN:
This movie turns on a scene where one of the heroes dumps his
fiancée in order to go off on a mission with two fellow soldiers: a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do! Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., Victor McLaglen, and Archibald Alexander Leach (aka Cary Grant) are sergeants
in British colonial India who take on a Thugee revolt, search for hidden
treasure, and somehow manage to save the Empire in their spare time.
Gunga Din was loosely inspired by the Rudyard Kipling
poem and I am sure there are some who would find it not exactly politically correct. Still, even the “bad guy”
gets in a great speech about devotion to one's beliefs. All good clean fun with plenty of guy stuff.
THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS
There’s a scene in here which made the entire movie for
me. Michael Douglas, playing the Great Lion Hunter, tells Val Kilmer, a British
engineer building a railroad in 19th century Africa, that he will not do anything
to cause his men to lose their respect for him. Instead of what might have turned into a brainless competition we get cooperation
among men. And cooperate they must in order to hunt down and kill the two man-eating lions of the title. Ghost and the
Darkness is based on a true story during the building of the Tsavo
River railroad bridge in 1898. A few elements were fictionalized, but
overall it’s a good film on a traditional male activity—hunting predators.
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA:
A movie with no speaking roles for women and a hit with both critics
and audiences? Lawrence of Arabia is one of the great war fliks, about the rise and fall of a hero, or anti-hero,
take your pick. And the hero is Thomas E. Lawrence, a British intelligence officer who became one of the leaders of World
War One’s Arab Revolt against the once mighty Ottoman Empire.
Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of Lawrence has been the subject of controversy. Critics have claimed the movie makes Lawrence look too effeminate, though this was a genuine attempt to show
the close relationships between men which were the norm at the time. We do see a solid friendship develop between Peter O’Toole’s
Lawrence and Omar Sharif’s character of Sherif Ali.
And Lawrence has to make some hard moral choices. In one scene he stops a tribal civil war from breaking out by personally
executing a man whose life he once saved and who has since turned murderer. There's a price to be paid for all that power.
There are a lot of interesting touches. One is the contrast between
the Arab camel-borne raiders and the emerging mechanized warfare of the World War with its armored cars, machineguns, motorcycles
and aeroplanes. As British artillery lights up the night skies, raining death on the Turks, Omar Sharif can only watch in
awe and horror, commenting, "God help the men under that barrage"--even though they are the enemy.
Lawrence of Arabia is a long movie, and you can get “director’s
cut” which includes several deleted scenes. Modern (i.e., post-MTV) audiences might find some of it a little too dragged
out, especially a sequence where they cross the desert to attack the Turkish stronghold at Aqaba. And the combat scenes are
deliberately shown without the usual Hollywood heroics, as either sweeping actions or horrendous
bloodbaths. The movie explains the politics behind the fighting quite handily and you can see something of how we got to the
current situation in the Middle East today from the desert battles fought almost a century
ago.
If Lawrence has a flaw, it's that it never quite explains
what the military situation is, as opposed to the political. It’s a good idea to read up about the historical events
of the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 if you want to follow what is going on in the movie. Or even read Lawrence’s own account, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. If not, just sit back
and enjoy.
CHARIOTS
OF FIRE
Ian Charleson and Ben Cross compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics sprinting event. On
one level, this is a pretty trite story. The biggest challenge the men have to face is a scheduling snafu. However Chariots
of Fire goes a lot deeper than the athletics. It's about men believing in what they believe in, and refusing to compromise
their core values. In the process, they take on Cambridge,
the Prince of Wales and each other. But the movie is not about conflict; everyone really is on the same side.
Despite the movie's surface patriotism, the men are not sacrificing themselves
for abstract ideals as expendable heroes. They are living their own lives to the fullest by running. The triumphs are small
in the grand scheme of things, but that makes them all the more meaningful. Since the movie is set in the immediate aftermath
of World War I, the pursuit of non-military goals is all the more significant.
Ian Holm has a nice supporting role as a trainer who has been banned from the
stadium, but who still revels in his protégé’s victory. The score by Vangelis became quite popular at the time, though
it feels anachronistic for a film set in the 1920s and gives Chariots of Fire a sometimes surreal aura.
RKO 281:
RKO 281 is
a movie about a movie. It's about the clash between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the former making a film
about the life of the latter--the film that would become Citizen Kane. We get to see two titans of the 1930s clash.
Hearst did not want his life turned into public entertainment (an odd thing for someone who made an empire out of the popular
media of his day, newspapers). Welles, who was the rising uberkind of his day, was determined to redefine the science
of motion picture making.
RKO 281 was
a HBO production, filmed mostly in London, oddly enough. Welles is played by Liev Schreiber and Hearst by James Cromwell.
Welles' writer-collaborator, Herman Mankiewicz, is John Malkovich, while Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, is played
by Melanie Griffith. And she sticks with her man, refusing to bail out on Hearst even when his world starts to disintegrate
around the both of them. They have a solid relationship which weathers the storm.
If RKO 281 has any flaw,
it is that it is just too short. I think we'd all liked to have seen more of the details of the actual making of the movie
within the movie. In the end, of course, Welles made his mark with Citizen Kane, but as RKO 281 sagely
observes, winning the battle is not necessarilly the same as winning the war.
INDIANA
JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE:
There’s some good stuff in here for men. Indiana Jones (Harrison
Ford) and his relation with his father (Sean Connery); a female villain who gets her comeuppance with poetic justice; and
a closing scene in which the four men heroes ride off into the sunset.
The movie is a modern quest for the Holy Grail. Men do manly stuff,
but most importantly, Indiana keeps his eyes on the quest.
He is willing to give up something very important at the end of the movie rather than allow it drag him to his doom–unlike
the female lead/villain who allows her own greed to consume her.
And yeah, a lot of this comes off as adolescent male fantasy,
but hey, it’s all in the spirit of the “No Girls Allowed” sign in the treehouse!
THE MALTESE FALCON:
Gumshoe Sam Spade takes on a host of sleazy characters in the
film that defined the noir genre. They're all on the trail of the McGuffin of the title, and the bodies start dropping
like raindrops on a San Francisco street. Humphrey Bogart's detective Spade is a hard case who, while tempted by Mary Astor's
femme fatale, in the end makes her take the fall. He'd rather avenge his partner and buddy, Miles Archer.
RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP
Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster are officers on a US Navy submarine
involved in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Imperial Japanese Navy in WW2--and with each other.
The movie is really about how men face up to and solve problems. The solution is not in out-killing the enemy, but in out-thinking
the situation.
Gable and Lancaster each have different command styles: one is
aristocratic, the other popular. Yet they find they have to work together to take on a wily enemy warship which is sinking
US subs. They also have to gain the respect of their men the hard way, by earning it. And they triumph in a neat twist of
an ending.
Among other things, Run Silent, Run Deep gives a gritty
realistic depiction of life on a submarine on wartime patrol. The crew members do look a little older than you'd expect, and
include a non-wisecracking Don Rickles.
TOBRUK
I first saw this on the big screen when I was a kid. I always
liked it. At the time perhaps I did not know why. I do now. Let me digress.
The movie is based on an actual British commando raid against
the Axis held port of Tobruk in Libya in 1942. Torbuk was the main supply depot for Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika (the
former Afrika Korps). By taking out the port's fuel storage bunkers, the British figured they could stop Rommel's
advance on Alexandria.
Tobruk the movie stars Rock Hudson, Nigel Greene, George
Peppard and Guy Stockwell as well as the tanks of the California National Guard dressed up to look like panzers, sort of.
Normally, I do not think too much of "commando" type movies since they present a ridiculous view of special
operations: an invinciple protagonist who slaughters dozens of his fellow men while barely breaking a sweat. Yep. But
Tobruk works on a different level. It's about men solving problems using their experience and their brains.
At one point in the film, the commandos' desert vehicle column is faced with crossing a minefield. Hudson's character gets
them through it, and how he does it is quite fascinating. Then there is some skullduggery. And some friendly fire. It's all
set across a desert environment which makes the commandos seem to be isolated on a strange and hostile planet. But they make
it through to their objective in the end. At which point the movie degenerates into the usual fireworks, but what the heck,
it's what the ticket paid for.
SANDS OF IWO JIMA:
This film inspired more people to join the US Marine Corps than anything else...John Wayne leads a Marine squad at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, two of the biggest bloodbaths of the Pacific War. It's a tough look at how men fight, die
and win.
The combat scenes are not glamorized Hollywood style. As Wayne's
squad's landing craft approaches Tarawa during the amphibious assault, one of the marines comments that the pre-landing air
and naval bombardment should have finished off the Japanese defenders. The other marines reply with grim silence, knowing
that one of the hardest fights of the Pacific Theater of Operations is going to follow once they hit the beach. You see the
combat from the infantryman's point of view. The marines land, take cover against murderous enemy fire, smoke a cigarette,
move inland, storm a pillbox, and afterwards someone tells the survivors the battle's been won. There's no pushover enemy
here, Wayne's men are informed they are up against Japan's best.
Afterwards, it's home for a brief period of furlough. Then it's
on to Iwo Jima and the assault on Mount Suribachi, covered in volcanic ash and bullets.
The ending is a classic.
THE GREAT ESCAPE
This is, as they say, based on a true story: the escape of Allied
prisoners of war from a German PoW camp in 1944. The movie gathered some of the great actors of the time -- Richard Attenborough,
Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn (with an Australian accent, no less!), Donald Pleasance, and a
host of others -- puts them in an impossible situation, and then lets them go to work. They organize, they specialize, they
get the job done. The result = freedom.
The movie Great Escape fictionalized the historical characters,
but the central story is true. It really is a fascinating look at how men get things done. There's no
victimization here. The men are too busy accomplishing great things. The processes of the "escape" are riveting: not simply
digging the tunnels, but also the logistics and intelligence work.
There's some cat-and-mouse in terms of outmaneuvering the Germans,
but it's more of an intellectual battle than the usual action movie shoot-em-up. A lot of The Great Escape's interest
is in how to out-think the foe. It shows that no matter how desperate the situation, as long as people can use their minds
they can triumph. And oh yes, Steve McQueen did his motorcycle thing in one of the great iconic film sequences of all
times. And while McQueen's character may end up in the "cooler", he is a free man.
