Category: ENTERTAINMENT

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Darkest Hour – Winston Churchill and the Monomyth

Prime Minister Winston Churchill – AP file photo

In the last six months,  bookend movies have been produced that focus on a very tight window of time from May to June, 1940, when the United Kingdom, under enormous external threat, faced an existential crisis of leadership and free will.   In a few short weeks, a dark reality presented with the spectacular collapse of its European democratic erstwhile ally France and its own military implosion on the continent as the German military machine split and cornered the whole of the British Expeditionary Force against the sea.  The assumptions of an entire generation of British political elite, that the dictator Hitler could be placated, or if requiring confrontation, subdued by fixed continental defenses, cascaded in the space of a few short days from misplaced confidence to absolute panic. The French multi-million man army possessing superior firepower and internal lines of support,  proved absent the critical will to absorb punishment, having exhausted its martial spirit in being bled white a generation earlier in the Great War conflagration.  The British forces, assuming themselves to be the flanking hammer in the low countries, found themselves instead flanked by a superior German philosophy of combined assault of armored thrusts and air cover, that quickly drove a wedge between the mass of the French force and the British forces through the Abbeville gap to the sea at Calais.  Flanked, then surrounded, the collapsing British fell against the beaches at Dunkirk,  hundreds of thousands of British infantry trapped against the seawalls, awaiting the inevitable end , like fish in a barrel.  The front line drama of this moment was captured in the summer 2017 movie, Dunkirk, and reviewed previously by Ramparts.  The missing back story of  Dunkirk, the unfolding of the impending disaster and the specific decisions of leadership as the German hegemon stood athwart Dunkirk poised to destroy British land defense capability, is the core of  Darkest Hour.

The coupling of the two movies, Dunkirk and  Darkest Hour, present at a curious time.  Atypical for the inspiration of such period historical dramas, there is no identified anniversary of events or people that would lead one to assume the enthusiasm and funding for such movies.  The events and the number of people who can physically remember them in actuality , is receding rapidly into the mists of time.  With the distance from such memories and their implied heroism, progressively goes the sense of recognition and interest in the existential  threat that faced the participants.  The globalist modern western world has little time for the concepts of “Christian Civilization” and “martial spirit” that drove Churchill and the common people of the United Kingdom to even consider that a battle to the death would be preferable to subjugation beneath  a Nazi philosophy of a master race. Modern globalists look aghast at the idea that an individual could reorder the tides of history through something as quant as personal will or loquacious inspiration.  Modern tides are defined by horizons defined by events and movements, such as Global Warming, Intersectionality, and Social Justice.  Individual freedom, the idea that one can determine one’s destiny in the face of such tides of history seems anachronistic.

The philosophical construct that great men can influence and direct outcomes in history found origin in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century Scottish writer. Articulating  the Great Man Theory, Carlyle surmised that certain individuals possessing exceptional charisma, insight and political will  could actually shape historical events decisively.   Such Heroes and Anti Heroes existed among men through time and predictably reassert individual impacts on historical forces.  The American author Joseph Campbell, in Hero of a Thousand Faces developed the concept as a unifying multi-cultural archetype through history, the Hero of the monomyth:

In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or “boon”), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon).                                    (wikipedia)

Winston Churchill has been identified as such a hero of the monomyth, and the very idea that this flawed individual could rise above myth and  possibly be the proof of a living, breathing example of the Great Man come to life has been the vortex of the battle of the two opposing views of history.

The movie Dunkirk,  for all its spectacular cinematic scope, stands slightly empty in that the human element is entirely interchangeable against the massive overwhelming threat that is the  unseen enemy.  The forces and events  that place the individual soldiers against the sea wall and lead others to try to save them are not developed beyond human suffering and the need to assuage such suffering.  The context that would suggest fighting to survive against overwhelming odds for an uncertain future might be preferable to surrendering to the inevitable is barely developed.

 Darkest Hour lives in a profoundly different cinematic universe.  The central figure Winston Churchill is fully developed and the action scenes only implied.  The movie coalesces around the forces of opposition to Churchill as he finds himself alone in a large sense of the movie, both figuratively and literally under attack from both internal and external forces. This movie monomyth finds himself swept up into the pinnacle of his career with, as suggested by the movie, nary a supporter other than his wife (even the American President Roosevelt throws him under the bus).  This Churchill is at times doddering and seems doubtful of his physical and mental abilities to perform the task, and needs reinforcement from his wife, his secretary, his king, and ultimately directly the British people themselves.  In actual events, Churchill had positioned himself at the crucible of moral strength through years of calling out the Conservative Party leadership for Britain’s lack of preparedness and correctly identifying the threat of Hitler while others appeased, and had sustained support from the opposition Labor party leaders who mistrusted any other Conservative leader to stand up to Hitler.  Upon ascending to the Prime Ministership on May 10th,1940, Churchill astounded others with his incredible work ethic and energy, working long days and far into the night, taking multiple flights into the war zone to buck up the French leaders, seek multiple alternative plans to attempt to arrest the tide and ultimately save the forces stranded at Dunkirk.

The movie does however function on a higher level in showing the politician Churchill recognizing that people he needed to convince were not his immediate cabinet so much as the people beyond.  The British people would be asked to sacrifice profoundly and needed to understand at their core what was at risk and what would be worthy of such sacrifice.  This is of course the monomyth’s gift of self knowledge that the hero Churchill receives, and delivers to his people that all important gift in language that has rarely been replicated for immediate impact and gathered unity of purpose.  In the gangway of the Commons, speech perched upon the red dispatch box of the Prime Minister, Churchill used his oratorical gifts  time and time again to frame the daunting challenge and stakes through the spring, summer and fall of 1940 when Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine.  The actor Gary Oldman epically reveals the internal pressures Churchill no doubt sensed and his ability to rise to the occasion in magnificent prose and take the entire weight upon his shoulders.  In the movie, the Viscount Halifax is quoted as saying after Churchill’s epic speech following Dunkirk, ” He has mobilized the language and sent it into battle”.   Though the quote is actually Edward R Murrow’s regarding Churchill years later, it fits the drama of the moment better than any, and works in the movie.

Darkest Hour, flaws of content and dramatic license aside, speaks to assert the role of a hero figure to impose his will on history.  This most world war of wars was obviously fought upon the sacrifice of untold millions to whom mere words held little solace.  But World War II was also a profound realization of the Hero and the Anti-Hero, so clear cut that the goal of each opposing force was always to try to find a way to kill Churchill or Hitler , so pivotal to the forces of light and darkness respectively each represented. When the world is at its darkest, one looks for illumination and salvation at the most mythic levels.   In a cinematic age of cartoon heroes , Darkest Hour gives us some insight on how real heroes find their way.

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An American Original – Glenn Campbell

Glenn Campbell
1936-2017

The current over enhanced and emotion deadened noise that passes for modern American popular music has separated us from the power that once was evoked from the marriage of lyric, voice, and musicianship that represented the golden age of music performance and recording.  Self absorbed and over engineered performers play one generic tome after another, calling out mechanical and soulless structure that blend together like musical hoppel poppel ,that leaves as soon as it is digested and extends no decernible satisfaction.  Attempt to recall, to sing, any of the ‘epics’ of the last twenty years and one is left with empty beat and emptier emotions that don’t linger beyond the vapid moment of vague familiarity and oppressive shallowness.

Then Glenn Campbell dies, and memories of musical greatness, like a sudden breach of a whale, or the ecstasy of one who has held their breath for too long under water and first gasps to fill one’s lungs with massive gulps of life giving oxygen,  come to mind.  Glenn Campbell was the holy trinity of performers.  He could sing like an angel. Interpret lyrics to touch one’s very core, and play the absolute hell out of a guitar.  No one who ever heard him failed to be just a little bit in awe of what the country boy from Arkansas was able to do with almost any strand of music.  When Alzheimer’s Disease stole his prodigious talent in 2012, and inevitably silenced him on August 8th, 2017, a ripple across the Cosmic celestial spheres was felt.

Glen Campbell came out of the outer banks of the American Frontier, born just outside the aptly named Delight, Arkansas on April 22, 1936.  His family was musical and Glenn took to the guitar like a fish to water, soon becoming  a participant in some of the family’s musical projects, a polyglot of american backwoods — gospel, bluegrass, and “cowboy” swing.  The teenage Campbell honed his craft in family efforts such as the Sandia Mountain Boys and the Western Wranglers, dipping into the vortex of post world war rural sound that was part Bob Wills  and part Ralph Stanley that would eventually become a force in American music known as Country and Western, with seminal stars such as Hank Williams, Kitty Wells,  Webb Pierce, and Ray Price.  C&W music no only told stories that brought sophisticated reflection to the rural life experience, but also the injection of seriously good musicians, like Chet Atkins and Buck Owens, innovators in both the acoustic and electronic voices of the new recording technologies of the post war world.  A great instrumentalist by the time he was 25, Glenn went in the opposite direction of most country inflected performers, away from Nashville and out to California, where nearly every performer recording in Los Angeles looked to have his tight and elite musicianship backing every album, from the Beach Boys to Frank Sinatra.

The not so hidden secret among studio musicians was that not only could Campbell play, he could sing as good as any performer he backed.  The general public did not discover this until Glenn Campbell discovered the songs of an obscure Oklahoman named Jimmy Webb, who could write as epically as Campbell could sing.  From mid-1967 till mid-1968, Glenn Campbell and Jimmy Webb managed to displace the colossus of the music world, the Beatles, as the world’s greatest selling artist,  with songs such as Galveston, Wichita Lineman, and By the Time I get to Phoenix.

In Jimmy Webb, Glenn Campbell had found his muse, and in Campbell, Jimmy Webb his siren.  The songs matched a profound and dignified humanity to real, everyday people caught in life’s most reflective moments, and Campbell’s perfect 21/2 octave ,innocent and aching, clarion of a voice made the simple words immortal.  Jimmy Webb, America’s greatest baby boomer songwriter and Campbell, America’s troubadour, had careers that lasted decades after, but were forever linked to their brief perfect union.   The two artists had collaborated on music that transcended pop, country, and rock to become indisputably American Music.  Fifty years later, it speaks to us in emotions and reflections as fresh as the day they were borne.

Glenn Campbell became a huge television star, hosting his own show, the Glenn Campbell Good Time Hour, promoting little known acts like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, would revolutionize the staid world of country music in the 1970s and 80s. He starred in movies such as True Grit and Any Which Way You Can, was a regular on Johnny Carson and achieved superstar status with songs such as Southern Nights and Rhinestone Cowboy.

The natural humbleness and boy next door on screen personality, however, could not withstand the typical stresses and attention of uberfame, and Campbell like many artists, lost himself in unstable relationships and substance abuse.  The productivity and quality suffered as well in the 1980s and 1990s until he was eventually able to achieve sobriety and take stock of himself.  A chastened performer in his final decades, he still at times overwhelmed audiences and fellow artists with his off the charts talent. The videos below are a wonderful memoriam to Glenn Campbell’s amazing talent, a man and his guitar wowing some of the biggest names in country with his beautiful honey tinged voice and guitar chops. The horrible prison that is Alzheimers took Glenn Campbell away when he still had so much to give. If you get a moment, turn todays’ pale imitations off, open your mind and absorb some true sensorial pleasure, on what legendary talent in the person of Glenn Campbell was all about.

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Miracle at Dunkirk: Re-Imagining History in the Post History Age

One of the “Little Boats” used at Dunkirk – Imperial War Museum

I recently had the occasion to see Director Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic “Dunkirk”.  We have been through a period in cinema , depicting heroism relegated to the contrived world of comic super heroes and steroid injected Ubermen,  where courage is universal because personal risk is essentially eliminated.  The real world is altogether different, where courage is usually selfless, with the recognition of one’s mortal being and the randomness and cruelty of destructive fate is ever present.  Nolan has attempted to revert back to old fashioned cinematic concepts of relating historical events, more in line with the effect upon individuals of sweeping and inexorable waves of history.  “Dunkirk” is told in perspective style, in which time is warped to view a simultaneous event from the perception of those on land, on water, and in the air.  Nolan tells everyone’s story on the Dunkirk beach by concentrating on no one’s particular story, instead, relaying a visual masterpiece of surreal beauty, claustrophobic terror, and harrowing visual and audial tension. It is heroism on a human scale, with self preservation in conflict with duty, small gestures raised to epic scope, and helplessness at war with determination.  It is a war epic in classic mode, leaving the seeds of conflict for others to tell, focusing on the innate  human quality of somehow rising to the occasion, forming the mythic foundations of the human story.

Nolan’s epic, though entertaining in both its visual scope and its technical virtuosity, is strangely absent in the critical ingredient needed to attain great cinematic art, the art of telling a mythic event as an engrossing story.  Nolan’s screenplay relates in intimate detail of the overwhelming sense of entrapment and helplessness of the hundreds of thousands of men clinging to the beaches of Dunkirk, but little of the story as to the reasons for their predicament, or of the heroic and determined effort of those who put them there, to get them out.  It is the obvious trap of having to tell a complex story that extends over a week, in the two hours that the movie can relate, that resulted in Nolan determining to leave the tension and heroism in, and the history out.  The result is, despite the brilliance on the screen, one leaves the theater with the story of the “miracle of Dunkirk” seeming vaguely flat and unsatisfying as an epic event.  It is unfortunately the burden of attempting to tell history to a post historical audience, in which the assumption of knowledge of the event and consideration of its importance to our current comfort and security meets  a mostly empty vessel of recognition.  Without presenting the background of the event to the modern audience, now immersed in a world of casual, politically corrected  facts and  extremely limited awareness of history, Nolan has made “Dunkirk” into an entertaining, but at its essence,  simple “disaster” movie, ultimately no more impactful than a characterless Poseidon Adventure.

Dunkirk holds more than enough epic stories to fill a serial movie treatment.  The extent of the looming disaster to western civilization cannot be underestimated.  The relative security and interlude of the ‘Phony War’ of the winter of 1940 came to a sudden and violent end with the Nazi war machine invading Belgium and ultimately France on May 10th, 1940.  Displaying “Blitzkrieg”, the innovative and overwhelming strategy of rapid ground advancement spearheaded with tanks accompanied by devastating air support, the German Wehrmacht achieved in weeks what they could not in 4 brutal years of trench fighting  in WWI, the encirclement of the entire British Expeditionary Force in Europe, along with the residual of the French army, in a small enclave in northwest France.  The only means of escape were the ports, and with the rapid loss of Boulogne and Calais, there was  left only a small salient around Dunkirk, ten miles from the Belgian border.  Over 400,000 British and French forces were bottled up against the coast with diminishing supplies and overwhelming opposition pinching from the flanks.    A near total loss of the critically trained foundation of the British Army was imminent. The developing catastrophe had caused the prime ministership of Neville Chamberlain to fall, with the massive responsibility and enormous consequences of failure now assigned to his replacement, Winston Churchill.  Loss of the expeditionary army of 300,000 men and equipment would likely leave the British homeland prostrate before the multi-faceted superiority of the German war machine.  The future survival of recognizable western civilization lay in the balance.

Pushed against the ocean in Dunkirk, the thousands of men lay inexorably trapped against the artillery from the surrounding enemy and the vicious strafing from the Luftwaffe from above.  The small silver lining was the curious decision of the German forces at the end of May to halt tank advancement against the Dunkirk enclave, believing the surroundings not conducive to tanks due to marshes,  and rely upon the air force to prevent extraction from the sea and devastate the residual force from the air.  This provided a small amount of breathing space for a complex and coordinated heroic attempt to hold off the Germans long enough to evacuate as many as could be evacuated by sea.

Troop evacuations off the beaches at Dunkirk June 1940 – wikipedia

Nicknamed Operation Dynamo, the plan consisted of a  barricade of predominantly French troops to prevent German ground forces from entering Dunkirk while coordinated landings of the bulk of the British fleet at the Dunkirk  port would remove soldiers under the relative security of British air cover.  The evacuations started on the 25th of May, and the onset of the plan was fully realized on the 26th.  The ominous goal of perhaps removing at most,  10% of the trapped troops, 40,000 men, was the hope of Churchill and his planning team.

The difficulty of the plan, both in scope and in diminishing available time, rapidly increased the chaos at the beaches.  Incoming boats with drafts too deep for the shallow waters of the harbor proved inadequate and slow for the process, and were vulnerable to both air attack and u-boat packs, with brutal losses of ships and men.  The inner harbor was soon abandoned  for the outer breakers, or moles, where men could more efficiently organize and board, though no less vulnerable to strafing attack, as harrowingly visualized in the movie. The mythic part of the evacuation was the participation of many British citizen sailors manning hundreds of small craft, known as the “little boats”, including the motorized life boat pictured at the top of this essay.  This motley armada braved seas, minefields, u-boats and strafing aircraft to pick up and deliver home tens of thousands of additional soldiers.

The evacuation routes from Dover to Dunkirk and back –  Route X was laced with minefields and Y with u-boats, but the shortest distance Z was abandoned due to its proximity to German land based artillery. – map by wikipedia

The tremulous dribble of troops out of Dunkirk soon turned into a flood, with at its height as many as 2500 troops an hour evacuated.  By June 4th, in stunning fashion,  over 338,200 British and French soldiers had been rescued and returned to the homeland, to be positioned to help defend the homeland and, maybe one day, reverse the tide against the Germans.

The losses to achieve the ‘miracle at Dunkirk’ were immense. Losses of thousands of defender’s lives, over 100 airplanes and crew, and 226 of 693 participating ships were sacrificed to accomplish the stunning feat. The collapse of the residual French army and the established hegemony over the mass of the European continent by the Nazi dictator was soon achieved.   Churchill recognized the reality in his comments to the House of Commons on June 4th, 1940,  regarding the Dunkirk evacuation:

What has happened is a miracle of deliverance, but we must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of victory.  Wars are not won by evacuations.”

A movie like Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” provides a ‘you are there’ realism that can be achieved by no other medium.  The movie pulls at your fears and elevates your senses to bring the immediacy of an event alive and current.  What the movie does not do is frame the “how and why” of history, bringing  meaning to sacrifice and perspective as to the outcome.  The immense scope of the endeavor and a nation’s gritty and determined effort to succeed against all odds,  from its leadership on down to the most common of men, is the real survival story of Dunkirk.  The participation of the whole and the sacrifice of blood, sweat and tears for principles that define events such as Dunkirk in the stirring tale of history.  Our post – historical world can only emotionally experience the tragedy of individual loss, too superficially cognizant in their civilization’s history to acknowledge the bounty of human achievement preserved for future generations in such moments.  Our current willingness to be ignorant of history makes us susceptible to emotionally resign to a life of  personal security for the greater intellectual demands of a life of meaning.  Dunkirk reminds us that giving in when there is hope is giving up our humanity.  Across the ocean lies a better future, if we are willing to dream.

 

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A Good Bye to Good Morning

Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly – “Singing in the Rain” 1952

2017 is upon us, and it will be a year of some momentously momentous moments requiring serious introspection that will likely fill the Ramparts blog with much of interest to the defenders of civilization.  For those of you who like that sort of thing, stay tuned – we love you checking in.   Ramparts can not say goodbye to 2016, however, without a brief and wistful homage to the memory of Debbie Reynolds, who passed away a mere day after her own daughter Carrie Fischer died of the sequelae of a cardiac arrest.

Ms. Reynolds death was not the tragic part, nor its proximity to her daughter’s death –  certainly sad, but not tragedy. Debbie Reynolds lived a long, eventful and fulfilling life, and though any passing is sad, it is not the pinnacle reason for homage.  It is with Debbie Reynolds passing that a particularly glorious form of American culture, the golden age of the movie musical, passes into memory as well.  Debbie Reynolds, at the very initiation of her adult life, managed somehow to find herself participating in a central role on what has become one of the enduring classics of the American Musical, 1952’s “Singing in the Rain”.   The stars that connected us to the great American Songbook through song and dance, in a larger than life projection on the movie screen from 1930 to 1960 – Astaire, Kelly, O’Connor, Sinatra, Crosby, Mary Martin, and …briefly, Debbie Reynolds-  are now all gone. The very unique cinematic expression of American can do spirit, essential goodness, vitality and optimism that these musicals projected, is seemingly old and jaded to our modern society.  Debbie Reynolds was perhaps the last living link to that different America, that looked up on the silver screen, saw themselves, and felt nothing but good vibes.

Singing in the Rain sits at the pinnacle of the American musical not because of a brilliant story line, perfect lyrics, original songs, or magical acting.  It was actually a story laid upon a series of songs by composer Arthur Freed that had seen performance in other musicals.  The basic plot was a Hollywood inside joke.  With the advent of talkies in Hollywood, it was discovered, not every star actor or actress – could talk.  At least not in a compelling way that made those watching believe in the illusion projected on the screen.  Gary Lockwood, played by Gene Kelly, is a silent movie star, who realizes that the time of long stares into the screen are over, and he will have to change, or say good bye to his career.  He is unfortunately saddled with his silent screen leading lady, Lina Lamont, played by Jean Hagan, who as it turns out, has the voice of a parakeet crossed with a New York cabbie.  The audience that loves Lockwood and Lamont are not going to buy anyone being romantic on the screen with the dialogue sounding like an argument at a fish market.  And so, as you might imagine in typical Hollywood fashion, Gene Kelly is rescued from the brink of star disaster from a complete unknown everygirl, played by 19 year old Debbie Reynolds.

It turns out 19 year old Debbie Reynolds was exactly who she played, a very young effervescent all American spirit who came from absolutely nowhere to hold her own with two of the greatest dancer showman in history, Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly.  She was real live nobody, with a story you couldn’t make up, if you tried to make it up.  She was born and raised in El Paso Texas into the poorest of circumstances, to a ditch digger father and a mother who did other people’s laundry to make ends meet.  Poor but decent and virtuous, straight out of Horatio Alger, Debbie moved with her family to try their luck in paradise –  California.  She was fortuitously plucked out of obscurity in a local beauty contest when she, still in high school,  won the title of Ms. Burbank, and was “discovered” by talent scouts from Warner Brothers and MGM, who were looking for an everyday girl who might be able to emote that special American perkiness.  No kidding.  That’s really how it happened.

A year and a half later, she was selected by the MGM studio to bring that “perky” American  can do spirit to the screen and was positioned to work with Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly, two huge stars and professional dancer/performers.  The problem was Debbie Reynolds, all of 19 years old, was not trained to sing or dance. Gene Kelly, a workaholic perfectionist,  one of cinema’s biggest stars having performed in Pal Joey, On the Town, and his oscar winning performance in American in Paris, was not amused.  He was the director of the movie and not at all comfortable with the studio forcing this young girl with no training onto his movie set, much less plunking her in the lead role.  He was very severe toward her, and looked to break her down and get her to leave.  But that wouldn’t be a very good end to our story, would it?  It turns out that a more sympathetic soul, Fred Astaire, who remembered people had been harsh to him when he started, saw something in Debbie Reynolds and helped her learn the complicated routines, persuading Kelly to give her a second chance. And with that, a better Hollywood ending to our story.

The trained up 19 year old Debbie Reynolds – not the most beautiful or graceful girl in movies- but with a special, unique, and magical ‘perky American’ screen presence that made those talent scouts look like geniuses — helped Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly pull off maybe the best 4 minutes  in cinematic musical history.  Singing in the Rain will always be remembered for Gene Kelly’s magnetic solo performance on the streets performing the title number in a downpour, but the central ensemble brilliance of the American musical is encapsulated in Debbie Reynolds star turn with the two men in “Good Morning”.

Debbie Reynolds was a star of stars thereafter, but like so many who found early perfection, never quite did anything so wonderful and so perfect, again.  Then again, the American movie musical, though it didn’t know it at the time, was coming into its waning moments, under the audiences’ inevitable turn toward the smaller screen of television for its entertainment.

Debbie Reynolds’s death closes the book on a long ago time, but the composition of her American story, from humble roots to the heights of personal accomplishment, based on her on energy, willingness to work, and concentration and confidence on her individual talents to see her through the difficult times, is a story we could certainly benefit from today. Good Bye Debbie Reynolds.  Thanks for reminding us, we can do great things when we believe in ourselves and don’t dwell on our circumstances.  Maybe our Good Morning may yet be in our future, if we remember how just good it can feel — to live out a dream.

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Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

     The wonderful 1944 musical Meet Me In St Louis directed by Vincente Minelli contains one of the most treasured Christmas songs ever written.  Performed by Judy Garland at the height of her artistic powers, sung to the emotionally distraught child actress Margaret O’Brien, the song and setting resulted in one of the most poignant and memorable moments in cinematic history.  The song never fails to capture for me the interwoven connection of the American public to this holiday through song, and the recognition of so many great song writers of the 20th century of this unique connection of the holiday to the American experience. 

     Written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane for the musical, the song frames the need for Judy Garland’s character Esther to try to explain to her little sister Tootie, played by O’Brien that a planned move from St. Louis to New York by the family will somehow turnout alright, though neither sister really believes it.  the lyricist Martin conveyed the impact of uprooting the family through the lyrics in desperate fashion:

“No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore;  faithful friends that were dear to us, will be near to us no more”

“But at least we will all be together, if the Fates allow;  From now on we’ll have to muddle through somehow“

     The lyrics painted such a dark sheen on the moment that Martin was asked by Garland to restore some hope to the lyrics, or she was not sure she could get through the song without both she and O’Brien collapsing in tears.  Martin did make an attempt particularly in the first lines, as :

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last. Next year we may all be living in the past”  became  “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight”  – a significant emotional reliever.

     The song in the emotional setting of World War II with so many separated and disrupted families was an immediate sensation both nationally and with the far flung troops.  The spectacular singing performance of Garland and the tears of her co-star O’Brien seemed to tear at the fragile stability each family felt with the war’s upheaval and perhaps better than any other Christmas song evoked the underlying bond that Americans feel toward family unity and the focal point for this unity that is associated with Christmas.

     It has been performed many times since by hundreds of artists , including a special version by Frank Sinatra, but nothing comes close to Judy Garland and the vulnerable, beautiful and sentimental performance by her in Meet Me in St. Louis:

 

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Brooks Comedy Perfection

     Working together on the western homage/farce Blazing Saddles, Gene Wilder intimated to Mel Brooks, the writer and producer of Blazing Saddles, that he had an idea for another homage movie based on the 1930’s classic Frankenstein.  Brooks intially stated the world hardly needed another sequel to the Frankenstein monster, which produced so many pale imitations over the years.  Thankfully, Wilder convinced Brooks the concept of a young Frankenstein scientist who wanted nothing to do with his family legacy was a funny idea, and the creation of the two, Young Frankenstein (1974) , approaches comedy cinematic perfection. 

     Brooks recognized the importance of  being respectfully true to the look and feel of the original while creating a madcap alternative universe to the original horror movie.   The movie look had the soft sheen black and white so reminiscent of the beautiful cinematography of the 1930’s, with the titles, fades, scene changes, and pace a perfect representation of the best technicians of the golden age of cinema.  Brooks additionally obsessively obtained original props from the original Frankenstein movie laboratory to capture the crucial scene of life creation bringing the intensity of the first movie to energize Brook’s version.  He structured a beautiful technical trellis upon which Wilder laid a magnificent madcap dialogue and screenplay and the result is a movie I have seen scores of times and have yet to avoid collapsing in laughter.

     Modern cinema has tried so many times to capture the art of making comedies that reflect back on classics but never have come remotely close to special achievement of Brooks, Wilder, and a terrific supporting cast.  The truth of the matter is that though Mel Brooks is as capable of the off color remark as the next guy, he truly loves cinema and  is darn good at the cinematic art.  Not every movie Mel Brooks has created has met the standard of great cinema – but Young Frankenstein is as good as it gets.  If its been a while, or your first viewing ever, prepare for a real treat.

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One Eyed Fat Man

    The word is out that the the Coen brothers, filmmakers of such wonderfully idiosyncratic movies such as Raising Arizona, Fargo, and No Country For Old Men, are in the process of remaking the classic western True Grit.  It follows that I would like to be the first in line to remark, what in the world are those Hollywood crazies up to now? Hollywood has become simply devoid of new story lines and capacities to interpret fundamental underpinnings of the American experience or culture.  A woe be gone TV show of  the  1960’s such as Batman is certainly safely open to revisionist thought as many times as Hollywood desires, but when the perfect synthesis of story, principle, acting craft, and entertainment comes together in a movie such as True Grit, as it has on other classics of the Hollywood’s past, do we really need a remake, however clever, to distort our initial and unique memory of a masterpiece?

     The great adventure movies of the past rested on the principle of the inevitable testing of the the hero’s capacity to face and ultimately in some eventually disclosed fashion, triumph over evil.   The heroes were often recognizable as better, stronger, more disciplined, braver than ourselves, and we feared for them in their crisis and cheered for them in their ultimate climatic battle.  These characters were perfected by John Wayne’s westerns and he became a symbol of the innate strength and inherent goodness of the American hero. In 1969, Hal Wallis and Henry Hathaway envisioned a new American hero captured from the pages of Charles Portis’s novel and brought to the screen by the western icon Wayne in a fashion his fans were not used to seeing, a fat, foul-mouthed drunkard with money as a motive and a willingness to kill in ambush.  The beauty of the story is the 14 year old character played by Kim Darby who expects to see justice done for the murder of her father and sees through the innumerable flaws of Wayne’s character Rooster Cogburn to the the primal heroic character within, emphasizing his capacity for deliverance in a trait she calls “true grit”. The movie has a spectacular set of supporting characters in addition to Darby including Robert Duvall, Glen Campbell, Dennis Hopper, Strother Martin, and Jeff Corey that bring the story the colorful layers that make it work so well, as well as the magnificent backdrops of the the Colorado San Juan Mountains around Ouray, Colorado.

     The climatic scene thrusts us back to the classic moment of true heroism  where the battle for the principle of right overwhelms all concerns for personal safety, ease, and odds of success.   What is “true grit”, does it represent foolish sacrifice? Who benefits from the sacrifice from the hero, what do we learn about ourselves in the process in fashioning a plan of action for own own personal crises? Wayne answers the calling for all of us with the realization that whatever our personal flaws, we are all capable of recognizing right from wrong and living life more successfully, and more fulfillingly on principle and personal character.  What ever the outcome, the journey of self realization proves most worthy when the principles are most clear.  In the end, there are no elements of confusion to Rooster Cogburn’s stand.

    To paraphase Robert Duvall…..that’s bold thoughts, from a one-eyed fat man.

 

 

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Beautiful Cinema

     Hollywood used to be about glamour. Its black and white films had a special translucence from the films’ unique sheen and soft focus, to the use of light and shadow to magnify underlying emotions or intimacy. The actor’s  film persona became especially tied to the cinematographer’s skill. Is there any doubt to the smoky allure Ingrid Bergman possessed in Casablanca or the innate goodness projected by Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln – no small measure contributed to by the skill of the cinematography.  Long after we forget the storyline details we remember their faces, and, in living through the cinema artist’s ability to evoke beauty and fantasy, briefly projecting ourselves into their glamorous world.

     A special thanks to the wizards at www.glumbert.com for capturing in a very unforgettable fashion , the magnificent gift of cinema through its beautiful leading ladies:

glumbert – Women in Film