Three Movies Showing the Grubby, Treacherous Side of Human Nature

Title: 5 Fingers (1952)

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Language: English (with bits of other languages, like German)
Rating: Unrated

This movie is an excellent espionage thriller. The main character isn't a hero, and I wasn't rooting for him to succeed, but I still found the story gripping, with all the twists, the double-crossing and mistrust and bitterness and greed. Also, James Mason's performance is wonderful.

Mason's character, Ulysses Diello, works for the British ambassador in Turkey during WWII. I won't tell you what his job is, because finding out as you watch the movie will probably give you more enjoyment. It's a job that has taught him how to maintain a neutral expression, regardless of his personal feelings. And he'll need this quality to pull off his nefarious plan, which is to sell some confidential information to the Nazis and then flee with the cash to start a new life elsewhere.

Does he achieve his hoped for ending, a life of luxury? Even if you're guessing that no, he doesn't, it's worth watching how it doesn't happen. 

Title: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

Director: Peter Yates

Language: English
Rating: R

This movie ends with both a whimper and a bang. 

Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) supplies weapons to bank robbers. He's also in contact with the feds, who want information about the higher-level gangsters he works with, part of an organized crime network in Massachusetts. Eddie is low on the organized crime totem pole, and he's in danger of going to jail for the rest of his life.

One thing I like about this movie is that it shows the sordid nature of crime. In other movies, criminal life often gets depicted as slick and daring. Here, it's a grubby world where people play against each other in the dark and scurry around to survive.

The shabbiness of Eddie's world also comes across in the shabby 70s atmosphere of coffee and pie in grubby diners, and cheap suits, and a gun dealer's loud yellow car.

The bank robberies in the movie are ugly and suspenseful. There's a real horror in them (starting with the masks the robbers wear), while at the same time everything about them is so shoddy and disgusting. Again, I like how there's no glamor given to crime.

Title: Pitfall (1948)
Director: André De Toth
Language: English
Rating: Not rated

This is a merciless sort of movie. The lead character, John Forbes (Dick Powell), gets to drive away at the end with his loyal wife, but it isn't a "happy ending." The outcomes for some of the characters show a lack of justice.

Forbes has a steady job and a loving wife and son. The movie gives a wry intelligence to his wife that makes the early depiction of their home life a little more interesting, and not just saccharine. But Forbes is bored of his life and – in the course of his work in insurance – starts an affair with a model, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). 

Mona is initially unaware of the fact that Forbes is married. Had she known, she wouldn't have started up with him. A surprising thing about Mona is that she isn't a conniving femme fatale. She isn't really a bad person at all, especially compared to the men around her. She attracts the attention of multiple distasteful men, including the dishonest Forbes, and – much worse – J.B. MacDonald (Raymond Burr), a private detective.

MacDonald is a gross, creepy stalker who's willing to coerce a woman into a sexual relationship. In a scene that's deeply uncomfortable, he shows up at Mona's workplace where she models clothes and has her try on different dresses while watching. Basically marking her as his property.

At the end, after various scenes of blackmail and violence, Forbes gets to coast back into his outwardly picture-perfect life. How does he live with what he's done? The ending has a bitter taste, but it's probably the ending best suited for this bleak movie.

Movie about veterans: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Title: The Best Years of Our Lives
Director: William Wyler
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

In The Best Years of Our Lives, three men return home from WWII and struggle to adjust to civilian life. Al (Frederic March), Fred (Dana Andrews), and Homer (Harold Russell) live in the same city, and though they've only just met on the plane home, their lives intersect in important ways throughout the movie.

Although they each enjoy happy or hopeful endings, the movie shows the ways in which their lives could have derailed (or still could derail after the closing credits). Al is welcomed back by his loving family, and the well-paid position he held at a bank remains open to him. However, he has taken to drinking heavily and isn't at ease either at home or at work. Fred can't find a good job, and his marriage is strained. He's also suffering from post-traumatic stress. Homer lost both his hands during the war and fears that his fiancee is sticking with him only out of pity. He also begins to isolate himself after receiving pitying and uncomfortable looks from family and friends. (Harold Russell actually did lose his hands during WWII, and this was his first movie role.)

Two 1940s movies with WWII vets struggling in post-war life

Title: Act of Violence (1949)
Director: Fred Zinnemann
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

At first, Act of Violence seems like a straightforward crime thriller set in post-war suburbia. Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) is a stalker menacing a peaceful home. He carries a gun and looks like he could use it without flinching. But Joe isn't a criminal, though he may become a murderer by the movie's end.

The man he is after is Frank Enley (Van Heflin). They served together in the war and spent time in a German POW camp. Frank now has a wife, Edith (Janet Leigh), and a baby son. He's well-respected in his community; people consider him a war hero. To Joe, Frank's cheerful, prosperous life is an injustice. Joe remembers what Frank did in the POW camp, and what his fellow POWs suffered for it. Joe is permanently injured and easily written off as crazy, but at least he survived and will now have his vengeance.

Act of Violence should be a better known movie for its strong acting, the tone of uneasiness throughout, and the difficult questions it raises. What would you do to stay alive? How do you manage to live with yourself, if you've either deliberately committed evil or made a terrible mistake? Are things you did under extraordinary circumstances reflective of your everyday character?

Joe and Frank wrestle with these questions post-war. As do the women in their lives - Edith, who learns disturbing information about her husband; Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), who as Joe's girlfriend tries to persuade him to abandon his revenge mission; and an aging prostitute, Pat (Mary Astor), who finds Frank when he's trying to hide from Joe. The movie doesn't make the mistake of turning Joe into a righteous hero and Frank into a full-fledged villain; Frank's reasons for acting as he did during the war are muddled, and Joe is so consumed by anger that he's becoming less of a person and more of a destructive force that will burn itself out.

As Seen Through These Eyes (2008): Confronting Annihilation with Art

Title: As Seen Through These Eyes
Director: Hilary Helstein
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

"As Seen Through These Eyes" is a documentary about the Holocaust, and specifically artists, musicians, and writers imprisoned in ghettos and concentration camps.

Sometimes, their artistic talent saved them from death. For instance, one man played the harmonica very well, and a camp commander requested regular performances. One woman was singled out by the infamous Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz to paint portraits of the camp's Romani population; while she saw their beauty, what Mengele was interested in was the exact shade of their skin and shape of their ears.

Other people were murdered because of their art. For instance, they may have been kept alive in a ghetto to draw up propaganda posters, and were caught also secretly sketching the scenes of misery and brutality around them.

Art also became a way for people to grapple with their trauma, during and after the Holocaust. They wrote, painted, and performed music that expressed their torment or that shared their longing for beauty and life. Sometimes art was their one form of freedom and their way of staying sane. One musician described the importance of playing the fiddle. Because his experiences in the camps felt like an uncontrolled bass rhythm inside of him, maybe the fiddle would balance out the bass and bring some harmony into his life.

The movie shows many examples of art and presents interviews with survivors. It's also narrated by Maya Angelou. Altogether a beautiful, moving documentary and worth watching at any time. I'm writing about it now because Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) begins this year at sundown, May 4.

Two stories on art and ugly politics

Title: Portrait of the Avant-Garde
Author: Peter Høeg
Translator: Barbara Haveland
Where I Read It: The Art of the Story
In the years leading up to WWII, Simon is intoxicated with his power as an artist. He sees his paintings as a way to remake the world. In his mind, he is a mini-god, wielding fire and air. He throws himself behind vicious political movements in Europe, because they promote a new order, a vision that appeals to him. He thinks of the process more than the consequences. The costs don't occur to him, because as a powerful artist he isn't a common person; he imagines he can stand astride the world and comfortably watch it burn.

To balance out the insufferable Simon, there's Nina, his lover. She's earth and water to his fire and air. She takes him to visit a remote island where she grew up. People move slowly there; things change slowly or not at all. Simon hears a myth about a warrior's power expressed in a dream, with the power dissolving when the warrior awakes. And then there are the final scenes, where he finally experiences what it is to be small, to have others impervious to his gestures and to the ideas he constructs. In one sense, the world remains his stage, but the audience doesn't watch him with admiration or terror.

Title: The Twenty-seventh Man
Author: Nathan Englander
Where I Read It: The Art of the Story
Stalin's police have rounded up a bunch of Jewish writers, and the story focuses on four of them who share a cell. One is an author who sold out to the regime and wrote government propaganda. The second is an old revered Yiddish writer. The third is a great bear of a poet, both soulful and crude. And the fourth, the twenty-seventh man, isn't known to anyone and was most likely arrested because of a fluke, a clerical error. He's spent his life quietly writing stories in his parents' inn; while they are interesting stories, he has made no effort to publish them or otherwise make a name for himself.

This is a nonsensical, brutal situation, and Englander understands the absurdity of it. There's no compelling reason for these writers to get arrested. And they know they're facing death. As they share a cell, their conversation raises questions about why people write and who they write for (this is set after WWII, and the old Yiddish writer, for example, knows full well that most of his audience has been slaughtered). What meaning do words have when you're a few hours away from facing a firing squad? People with wisdom, talent, and regrets try to make sense of their impending death.

(Who is listening? At the very least, they're hearing each other out, and what is that worth? Depending on how you look at it, it could be worth very little or could mean everything in the world. Final flickers from creative minds about to be extinguished. Maybe they can still give each other a reason to live even when they're about to die.)

The Periodic Table: A Chemical Narrative Framework for Primo Levi's Life

That is what nature does: it draws the fern's grace from the putrefaction of the forest floor…

The Periodic Table, which I read for the Classics Club Challenge, is author Primo Levi's autobiography told in a series of elements (and translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal). Levi worked as an industrial chemist and survived a year in Auschwitz after being captured while fighting in the Italian resistance against the Nazis. Each chapter in his book centers on a different element and how it ties into some facet of his life.

I loved this unique, poetic approach to the elements. What an element symbolizes or what its association is with his life might be subtle. But it's the organizing principle of his life's narrative (at least the one he shares here) - sometimes because a memorable episode of his life involved the use of a given element, other times because someone or something reminded him of it and its properties.

There might be an important lesson from chemistry.

… one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences…

But it isn't as if he spends the entirety of the text talking in chemistry-related terms. There's poetry too, and an exploration of philosophy and emotions. As when he's captured as a partisan.

During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and a I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly, and I felt time running through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that can no longer be stanched.

Or when he falls in love.

In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor…

And the poetry and chemistry freely mix too, as during his stint at a mine analyzing the soil for the presence of certain elements, he compares the elusive nickel to a sprite darting out of reach "with long perked ears, always ready to flee from the blows of the investigating pickax, levying you with nothing to show for it."

The use of the elements lends a certain weight and permanence to his life's story; he's tying himself to the stuff of the Earth. At the same time, his forays into chemistry often mirror the messiness and transitory qualities of his life; it's not all about simple, tidy formulae, though it feels like a triumph when a formula turns out as expected. Throughout the book he unearths episodes of his life and examines them. What holds them together? He constructs a loose narrative framework of chemistry and poetry. And somehow his life's story can hang together on that. (Which raises other questions about what constitutes a narrative, and how does one find meaning in life? He found an approach unique to his own life.)

Mr. Sammler's Planet: Mr. Sammler Is the Moon

(I read this novel for the Classics Club challenge.)

For much of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Artur Sammler reminds me of a gasping fish on a garbage heap. In some ways, he is also like the moon.

Why is he gasping for air?

Sammler is living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1960s. He has a keen eye for all the ways society is crumbling. He makes note of the crudeness and immaturity, the lack of dignity and stuntedness in people's behavior. As an intellectual, he is asked at one point to give a talk at a university and is soundly rejected by the audience for being old and impotent. Society, he thinks, has been given over to children and barbarians.

Had the book stayed on this level, of an elderly intellectual analyzing the defects of the society around him, it would not have been as interesting as what it becomes. Because, even as Mr. Sammler assesses the surrounding degradations, he doesn't think that he has any solutions to offer.

Nonfiction Book of the Month: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Written by a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, it's a book that will change your life.

I'll just leave an excerpt here:

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah)

The song in the video, sung by Sophie Milman, is "Eli, Eli" - a poem written by Hannah Senesh and set to a melody composed by David Zahavi.

Senesh (1921-1944) was a Jewish parachutist who was captured by the Nazis and their collaborators in Hungary in 1944. After subjecting her to months of torture, through which they tried and failed to get information out of her about her mission, they executed her by firing squad.

Here's an English translation from the Hebrew of "Eli, Eli":

My God, my God,
May these things never end,
The sand and the sea,
The murmur of the water,
The lightning of the heavens,
The prayer of man.

אלי, אלי
שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רשרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם

Worth Watching: The King's Speech (2010)

Title: The King's Speech
Director: Tom Hooper
Language: English
Rating: R (because His Royal Highness doesn't stammer when he's cursing a blue streak)

Synopsis
The Duke of York (Colin Firth), known as "Bertie" to his family, is second in line to the throne after his older brother. Bertie prefers to stay out of the public eye; the few speeches required of him are disastrous on account of his stammer. At the arrangement of his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), he undergoes speech therapy with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who demands great effort and openness from him. In spite of some progress, Bertie still stumbles during moments of nerves and high emotion. After his father, George V (Michael Gambon), dies and his brother, Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), abdicates the throne, Bertie becomes King George VI. On the eve of WWII he's required to broadcast an important speech with a strength and eloquence he's convinced he'll never possess.





Characters
Lionel Logue is passionate, wry, and just a little bit bonkers (in a manner unique to Geoffrey Rush). His character is also deepened by personal disappointments and struggles, such as his inability to start up a career as a Shakespearean actor.





From Colin Firth's Bertie you get a sense of a decent man who's fun to be around when he can relax, which isn't often. The few people who make him feel at ease are his wife and daughters (the elder of the two became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952). As his wife, Helena Bonham Carter is good at mixing upper-class restraint and properness with the sense of fun and play that she's brought to other very different movie roles.

I got a kick out of the fact that they made Winston Churchill a character, though I laughed too because I recognized the actor who plays him (Timothy Spall) from only one other role: Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films. He doesn't look sufficiently different from Peter here and doesn't have a large enough part to make himself a distinct character, so I kept thinking of him as an animagus politician. Another "cross-over" moment that briefly threw me out of the film was the scene where Lionel Logue's wife, Myrtle (Elizabeth Ehle), meets Bertie for the first time. Ehle starred as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's grand 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, which also made Colin Firth famous as Mr. Darcy; it's probably still the role that Firth is most strongly associated with. So to have the two of them meet in a quiet room tipped the movie back into the Regency era for a few seconds, and I expected him to launch into a pompous marriage proposal. But then I was tilted right back to the 1930s, because Myrtle Logue treated the king with a nervous deference that Elizabeth Bennet would never have felt in the presence of Mr. Darcy.

Relationships and conflicts
Bertie and Lionel become friends, though it's a struggle, and they fight along the way. Bertie hates appearing vulnerable, and he's had to deal with so many quacks that it takes him time to trust someone; he's also conscious of the difference in station between him and Lionel, and it isn't easy for him to get used to Lionel's informality. Add to that the pressure of his public duties and the fact that he had thought, with great relief, that he'd never be king, and friction between the two men is inevitable. With the exception of his wife and daughters, Bertie tends to be reserved around everyone, in part as a defense mechanism against the mocking he's endured over his stuttering.

Bertie is sweet to his daughters and has a steady source of warm support and companionship from his wife, who consoles him, cheers him up, banters with him, and occasionally sits on him or stuffs things into his mouth. Firth and Bonham Carter play well off each other.





Memorable sights and sounds
Lionel runs Bertie through various exercises that lend themselves to interesting visuals (like Bertie rolling around on the floor) and sounds (vowels belted out with mixed dignity and silliness). At a few points in the movie, Bertie also speaks in song; if he couches his sentences in the melody of a familiar song, he stutters much less or not at all. This use of song sometimes has a comic effect but at other times is used to highlight a personal melancholy.

I also loved Bertie's expression as he hears himself deliver a soliloquy from Hamlet. Lionel had him record it while being drowned out by music so that he couldn't actually hear himself speak. Later on, after breaking off in disgust from Lionel Logue and his unconventional methods, Bertie listens to his own voice speaking steadily, and it's a wonderful moment of revelation. Shakespeare in general is woven nicely into the movie (including Lionel's audition for the part of Richard III).

Stand-out scenes
The King Edward's Chair scene. Bertie's confidence initially lapses, and it seems that he's going to give up again on working with Lionel. But after Lionel insolently drapes himself over King Edward's Chair, which is the throne used during a monarch's coronation, Bertie's anger at Lionel's presumption prompts him to eventually shout out that he has a voice! Bertie also shows himself to have a feeling and respect for tradition that contrasts with his older brother's depicted carelessness in abdicating the throne to be with Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

Another great scene is the climactic delivery of the speech on the eve of WWII ("In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history..."). The movie cuts back and forth between Bertie picking his way through it word by word, with Lionel standing opposite him, gesturing and coaching, and the king's large audience including various people in their homes, Bertie's family in the palace, and his older brother and Mrs. Simpson.

Further thoughts
Though the movie isn't a documentary and was made to show a man overcoming challenges to rise to the occasion, it still interests me to think about how the filmmakers played around with history and with the characters. For the sake of drama, the relationship between Lionel and Bertie was compressed to a shorter period of time, when in fact they had been working together since the 1920s; and who knows if they ever got to be this informal with one another by the end. I haven't read enough about the characters in general to venture a guess as to what they were like with each other. The movie also omits the whole issue of Neville Chamberlain and appeasement (along with George VI's public show of support for Chamberlain after the Munich Pact) and depicts Churchill and George VI as being friendly and supportive of one another from the very beginning. The filmmakers shape it so that everyone seems more or less united at the war's start, with George VI hoping that his speech impediment won't prevent him from being a resolute figurehead, a symbol of strength and resistance. And it's true that during the war, he and his wife appeared often in public, and visited various places in the UK and abroad, to boost morale.

Here's an actual recording of George VI, delivering the speech on September 3rd, 1939:



The text of the speech is here.

*All images link back to their source (Flixster community).

Week in Seven Words #80

all-purpose
When in doubt, buy them a gift card for a book store.

assurance
I half-expect an angry email. Instead I get concern, what sounds like a willingness to understand. I'm surprised. Years ago it would have been different. I wish I had possessed the confidence and faith to speak sooner.

clunky
Sitting on the floor gives me a strange perspective of the table and its unsteady piles of intermingled books, papers, notebooks, and journals. A water bottle looks like an alien totem, and the lamp towers solemnly over the laptop. Everything seems large and somewhat foolish, like children's toys meant to be tossed around and banged up.

curdled
No matter how many papers I go through, by the end of the day I'm no closer to having it figured out.

dovelike
The reading of the Book of Lamentations starts unexpectedly from a soft-spoken man at the back of the shul.

forbearing
About an hour before the fast ends, I start getting distracted with thoughts of food. My stomach isn't rumbling, but there's an odd clench to it, as if it's disgruntled but too polite to whine.

maquis
I feel like I should have learned about Nancy Wake prior to her death at age 98. She hasn't passed unnoticed, but she and others like her ought to be better known.

Hatikva

Someone sent me this video today:



Violin maker Amnon Weinstein painstakingly collected and restored violins that were used by Holocaust victims, and here they're played at a 2008 concert in Jerusalem; one of the victims was a 12 year old boy who smuggled explosives in his violin case - these explosives were used against German troops in Eastern Europe.

Hatikva ("The Hope") is the Israeli national anthem. The melody is based on a Renaissance era Italian song, La Mantovana - from the Renaissance onwards this melody appeared in a number of different folk songs across Europe from Scotland to Poland; it was also used by the 19th-century composer Smetana in his piece, Vltava or Die Moldau - one of a group of several symphonic poems he wrote in tribute to Bohemia, his homeland (the Vltava is a river that runs through Prague).

Think of the music played on these violins prior to the Holocaust - klezmer and other folk music for instance; their owners might have once played the melody of La Mantovana on them in one form or another (or if they were classical musicians, maybe they performed Vltava in a concert hall). In any case these instruments, which were in pieces (at least one of them found buried in a concentration camp) are whole again, a legacy from the people who owned them and made music on them.

US 3rd Armored Division

On Veterans Day this past week, I searched for some footage of troops and veterans, and found a Vimeo account for the US 3rd Armored Division (which was active from 1941 to 1992); they had posted all kinds of videos, from interviews with veterans to footage from various campaigns across decades.

Here's one that shows General Eisenhower making an inspection of the 3rd Armored Division in February 1944, just a few months before D-Day. During WWII, the 3rd Armored Division came to be known as the "Spearhead Division" (especially under the leadership of Major General Maurice Rose, who was killed in action in March 1945); they made great gains for the Allies in the battle for Europe, and they suffered many deaths and casualties.

Eisenhower inspects 3AD - 1944 from 3AD.com on Vimeo.

And this one takes place at a memorial service in Iraq in 1991 and shows Sgt. Preston Holloway of the 3rd Armored Division singing the National Anthem. Before he begins singing, another soldier shares the following quote: "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch".

Soldier sings National Anthem from 3AD.com on Vimeo.

Thank you to our veterans for their service across the decades.

Week in Seven Words #39

bullion
Golden bars of sunlight on deep green grass.

cachinnate
When I learn with her, and we're sitting with our books in front of us, we tend to laugh, sometimes a lot. It seems that the laughter is what I remember the most afterwards.

groundwork
Infants are often thought of as amoral; they might squirm, smile, cry, babble, explore, but making a judgment about another person's actions might seem to be beyond their capacities. As it turns out, there's evidence that infants younger than a year do show preferences for people (and characters) who are helpful and kind to another person over those who hinder and thwart; from what I recall they also prefer people who remain neutrally uninvolved to those who actively undermine another person's efforts (and prefer those who actively help to those who remain uninvolved). Rudiments of morality, good deeds and a sense of justice are there, even before they can speak.

regard
He speaks quite eloquently about love. Not love in the sense of falling head over heels, or getting swept away, or any other conception of love that involves losing one's mind or will to passions that are beyond personal control. He speaks about love as a choice and commitment, as something that deepens and grows throughout life, that glows inside of a healthy self and spreads outwards in ever-widening circles.

stalwart
A son of one of the Bielsky brothers talks about his father's and uncles' experiences leading a Jewish partisan group against Nazis and Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe and saving over 1200 Jews (young, old, healthy, sick, men, women, and children). Several thoughts come out of the talk - the human spirit and human courage are amazing; heroes are flesh-and-blood imperfect people; and what's it like to live with this family legacy, to be the son and nephew of people who did things like that? (From this speaker I sense deep pride but also, especially when he was younger, a need to prove that he too has guts and can live up to the family name.)

unmotivated
Friday afternoon. People's primary concern seems to be whether there's any coffee or cookies left.

waxy
Yellow leaves on slicked pavement.