R.P. Barr

Reality and Memorial Day

Have you been watching America: The Story of Us on the History Channel?  It is a magnificent series that emphasizes the experiences of ordinary people.  During their segment on World War II, I heard an interesting line:  “In the first sixteen and a half months of the war, twelve thousand military men die, but sixty-four thousand American workers die through accidents.”

 The narrator did not speculate on how many of the military deaths were accidents.  In fact the pictures reinforced the stereotype that all military deaths are due to enemy action.  It is simply not true.

 The famous non-fiction book, Friendly Fire,  described the anguished search by an Iowa couple to learn the truth of how their son was killed in Vietnam.  As I recall, the questioning began when the mother insisted on seeing her son’s wounds, apparently having assumed they would be horrific.  There was only one tiny hole in his torso.  In the end, the author found that Michael Mullen had been in the field on an operation, and because of the heat and humidity in Vietnam, had taken off his flak jacket to go to sleep.  An American artillery unit some distance away did not take the height of the trees into account when they fired.  A shell exploded in the treetops above the sleeping men and a single piece of shrapnel killed Mullen.

 During that time, Department of Defense records showed that more service men and women died in Vietnam in vehicle accidents alone than were killed in action.  Michael Mullen was not alone.

While I was in Army basic training, two recruits went onto the rifle range during the night or early morning hours and hid behind the targets.  They could not have failed to hear the loudspeaker instructions to the soldiers on the firing line.  Suicides have always been a part of military life and death.

 I was stationed at Presidio San Francisco.  The post had a large stockade.  One of the prisoners there had serious psychological/emotional problems, and was taking Army prescribed medication.  Or, he had been taking it until arriving at the stockade.  His medication was denied him and the prisoner descended into noticeable distress.  One day on work detail, he approached a guard with a shotgun and asked what the guard would do if he ran away.  The guard answered that he would shoot the prisoner.  Not long afterward, the depressed prisoner ran and the guard killed him.

 My unit was the 30^th Military Police Battalion.  We carried .45 pistols on duty.  The normal way of preparing the .45 to fire was to insert a magazine into the grip, and then, by tightly gripping the steel slide,  pull it to the rear and release.  A strong spring snaps the slide back to normal and the mechanism pulls a bullet from the top of the magazine into firing position.  One of my colleagues had seen someone slap the slide hard enough to chamber a round and thought that it looked cool.  So, after checking out his pistol from the armory, he got on the bus to the MP station with the rest of his shift and tried out the trick.  It didn’t work the way he planned.  The young soldier blew a hole through the center of his hand large enough to drop a pencil through, and if the seat in front of him had not been empty, he could have killed someone else.

 Later, during my eight years with the Veterans Administration, I heard a lot of stories about injuries and deaths.  Very few of them involved combat.  There was the black soldier whose hitch was up and received his discharge from a fort in Texas.  He left the base wearing his uniform and somebody shot him to death on the road. 

 There was the Hispanic vet who had been in the Navy.  During one tour of sea duty several Hispanic sailors had disappeared from his ship.  Jumping overboard is apparently a common way that sailors commit suicide.  That’s what everyone assumed happened to the missing seamen.  Then, a large white sailor grabbed the vet that I spoke to and threw him over the side.  Fortunately, he was able to grab onto something (I forget what—a rope or chain or whatever it is that hangs over the sides of ships).  He hung there, dangling over the ocean shouting for help.  His assailant was eventually convicted of attempted murder, but was not charged in the probable murder of the other sailors.

My point is not to say that the dead we honor on Memorial Day did not die as heroes.  Most of them didn’t—not in the conventional way.  What I want to emphasize is that they went to do dangerous work on our behalf.  Of the millions who served, only a few charged up hillsides to attack machine gun nests, or flew in aerial dogfights, but the rest were there.  Crime victims and accident victims, they were away from home in the service of their country and their wounds—their illnesses—were a consequence of that service.  Memorial Day should not be a time to remember Hollywood pyrotechnics.  Service men and women are flesh-and-blood human beings with faults and lapses of judgment who give their energy, their work, their bodies and their lives for people they don’t even know.  They do it for us.

 If anyone reads this who is currently in the military, I have one last remembrance for you.  A young widow called me one day while I was working the phone bank at the VA.  She had just received a letter denying her benefits.  I could hear the strain in her voice and a baby in the background.  She needed those benefits.  I asked what reason was given for the denial.  “Willful misconduct.”  She asked what that meant.  Her husband had been on active duty and he was killed on base.

I asked how he had died.  “He was in a motorcycle accident.”  I took a deep breath because I knew just what had happened and that this woman and her child were not going to receive any medical benefits, or monthly checks, or educational assistance.  Now, I had to tell her.  “Willful misconduct means that he was doing something that he should have known not to do.  In this case—“  I decided to go with the least likely scenario first as if that would soften the blow.  “—if he had stolen the motorcycle, or—“  I felt a lump come to my throat.  “—if he had been driving drunk.”

The other end of the line went silent—proof that I had guessed right.  The baby still fussed in the background.  Finally, in a cracking voice, the woman, managed to say, “Thank you.”  As she hung up, I cursed the son-of-a-bitch who had been so selfish and left his family with nothing.

After all these years, he is still one of a specific few military dead that I exclude from my prayers.  May God bless the rest.

Remembering Gale Storm and Karl Malden

There were two other entertainers’ deaths at the end of last week.  I was a fan of both, and feel that their passing has been overshadowed by the public mourning for Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett.  I am speaking of Gale Storm and Karl Malden.

 Gale Storm was a contract actress who typically played the love interest in a variety of movies that are mostly forgotten.  She had started out as a singer, but had little chance to show off that talent.  However, genetics were on her side and when she was thirty, she still looked young enough to play the twenty-ish title role in the television series, My Little Margie.  I Love Lucy had broken new ground in TV comedy in October 1951, and My Little Margie premiered the following year.  (That part confuses me, because I remember the series fairly well, but I was still pre-school when it started—I wasn’t that precocious.)  Storm excelled at light comedy.

She wore her dark hair short and curled, and her dresses full, portraying a meddling young woman with a good heart whose plans never went according to plan.  Margie lived with her father, Vern, played by the star of silent movies, Charles Farrell.  Farrell’s gray hair was high above his forehead, swept back, and he had a penchant for light colored suits.  They lived in a high rise apartment building.  Vern’s love interest, Roberta Townsend was played by the sultry Hillary Brooke.  Roberta lived conveniently across the hall and was often sucked into Margie’s schemes.  Margie’s backup boyfriend, Freddie was always a phone call away, but he was a dork and Margie was always looking to trade up.  She delivered a trademark gutteral "D-d-d-d-d-d-d" sound into the camera that marked her realization when her plans went awry.

I don’t remember any of the plots.  Fess Parker of Davy Crockett fame was in a couple episodes.  My most vivid memory, however, was of an episode called, “The Health With Yoga.”  I remember it because Margie and a reluctant Freddie embraced health food.  I had never heard of yoghurt or wheat germ before they tried both and pronounced them inedible.  More than five years passed before these products finally appeared on the grocery shelves in my town.  A teenager by then, I promptly brought them home for a trial.  The plain yoghurt was indeed unpalatable, and I didn’t try it again for another five years when I moved to New York and found that Dannon had added flavors to the stuff.  Wheat germ, on the other hand, became a regular additive to my diet.

 After a four year run, My Little Margie lost it’s lease.  Gale Storm had become a small-screen star and promptly launced another show called, Oh, Susannah in which she played a cruse ship’s recreation director.  Her cohort in nautical adventure was another silent  film star, Zazu Pitts. 

 This show gave Stom opportunities to sing.  I specifically remember “Dark Moon,” which became a hit for her.  Although in her mid to late thirties at this time, Storm released a rock-and-roll song that also sold well: “I Hear You Knockin’”  (The record companies at that time did not realize that a fundamental feature of rock-and-roll was to reject main stream adult performers.)  These and other Storm recordings are available on-line for downloading. 

Karl Malden is better known to today’s audiences.  The face that prevented him from landing leading man roles was instantly recognizable.  He was also very believable in all of his roles.  I never saw a bad or even mediocre perfomance from Malden.  He knew how to find the passion in all of his characters.

 He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in On the Waterfront.  There is a famous scene in which Malden’s character, a priest, is in the hold of a cargo ship trying to rally the longshoremen to rise up against the mob-controlled union.  At one point, one of the longshoremen throws a soda can that hits Malden in the forehead, causing it to bleed.  This angers the priest and he hammers home his diatribe.

 As it happened, the director, Elia Kazan, was not pleased with Malden during the run-throughs of this scene.  The rubber can would bounce off Malden’s head again and again, but the dialogue did not explode the way Kazan wanted.  So, when the cameras were rolling, Kazan substituted a real can for the rubber one.  These were the days before aluminum cans, sodas were inside steel cans with welded lids.  The blood you see in the movie was real, and the fire in Malden’s eyes is not acting.

 Having lived in San Francisco, I was a devoted viewer of The Streets of San Francisco,  the show that finally brought Malden to the small screen.  Michael Douglas became famous as Malden’s sidekick.  Those were strange times for cop shows, and Malden felt betrayed by the network when the show was finally cancelled.  As he explained it, he had wanted to make the show more about the characters and the procedures of catching the bad guys.  The networks kept pushing for more action to pull in the viewers.  Then when there was pressure from the public to tone down the violence on TV, the network responded by pulling Malden’s popular show.

 Aside from On the Waterfront, two other performances that I recommend are his cuckolded husband in Tennesse Williams’ Baby Doll,  and as the father of the victim in the TV mini-series Fatal Vision.  The latter was based on the true story of an Army Special Forces doctor who murdered his wife and family.  The real-life father of the wife defended his son-in-law and performed his own investigation to prove the doctor innocent.  Malden was facinating as he uncovered fact after fact that changed his mind and convinced him of the doctor’s guilt.  Then, he had to convince the authorities.

I couldn’t find that Karl Malden and Gale Storm had ever worked together, or even knew each other.  But, there is something that they had in common.  They were both competent working actors who honored the profession, and had quiet, stable personal lives.  Malden recently celebrated his 70^th anniversary with his wife.  Storm had four children and 45 years with her first husband until his death.  She subsequently remarried for another eight years until that husband passed away.  These are people who deserve to be remembered.  

Bond's blondes, brunettes and a redhead

As a change of pace from the grim stuff that I usually write about, I thought that I would devote a few words to the Bond franchise.  A new film is coming out and 007 is the longest running series in the history of film.  So much of the stuff I see in magazines and on-line is written by twenty-somethings without perspective.  They like to make lists of the best television comedies or the most beautiful people ever, and then don’t mention anything before the 1980’s unless it’s an icon like “I Love Lucy” or Marilyn Monroe. Well, as proud owner of all of the Bond movies including the spoof with David Niven as Bond and the excrutiatingly awful tv version of Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson (who was the worst Bond ever), I would like to weigh in on the subject of the “Bond girls,” although with the possible exception of Lynn Holly Johnson (who played a teenager, but was actually 23 when she made For Your Eyes Only), they were all quite defintely women.  The extra syllable in “women” wrecks the symetry of the term however, and it just doesn’t sound as good.

 Almost every actress who talked about her role has said that it was a departure from the typical “Bond girl.”.  However, individuality and liberation were the norms for the major women’s roles in the 007 films.  That nearly all of them succombed to Bond’s charms was what they had in common.  It was the forgiveable conceit of the series, that all the baddies miss when they shoot at Bond and all of the women fall into bed with the hero.

 All except the number one lady on my list.  The woman who was always there for him was Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny.  While many have forgotten, Miss M was quite fetching in her early appearances and I have always faulted Bond for not giving her a tumble.  Of course, monogamy was contrary to his nature, and it just wouldn’t do to cheat on the boss’s secretary—although that would have been an interesting film: Death Us Do Part.  Still, I have always fantasized about a different kind of movie in which Miss Moneypenny (played by Maxwell) was kidnapped to learn what she knew about MI5 affairs, and Bond had to go after her.

 Ursula Andress (Honey Rider) is usually the number one Bond girl on the other lists, but aside from the way she walks out of the surf in her white bikini, I find little that is memorable.  She is much better opposite Peter Sellers in Casino Royale.  The actress I preferred to Andress in Dr. No was Zena Marshall (Miss Taro), the brunette who listened at keyholes in the embassy and took Bond to bed in order to delay him until Dr. No’s goons could come for him.

 Before completely passing over the 1967 Casino Royale (which purists will criticize me for including at all), I would like to cite Barbara Bouchet as Moneypenny, who took her executive assistant role out of the office and into both the bedroom and the line of fire for God and country and Bond.  Deborah Kerr displayed an excellent flair for comedy as Agent Mimi who impersonates M’s widow to ensnare David Niven’s Bond in a scandal, but has a change of heart and saves him.  Jacqueline Bisset also deserves notice for the minor role of Miss Goodthighs.  I don’t remember what she did, she just deserves notice.

 Also high on my list is Daniela Bianchi (Tatiana Romanova), the Italian actress who came From Russia With Love.  Poor Miss Bianchi’s accent was reportedly so bad that all of her dialogue had to be dubbed.  FRWL remains the one 007 film most akin to real life—still several clicks away from the grit and tedium of true espionage, but closer than the others.  All of the toys are real, and the stunts are believable.  To that end, Bianchi played her part well as a pawn in the game whose loyalties are tested.

 Many listers give kudos to Lotte Lenya (Rosa Klebb) as the lebian opperative for Spectre.  A woman who has an stilletto poison blade in her shoe and recruits Tatiana to become bait for Bond.  I agree that Lenya should have been given a larger role, but movie execs were hesitant about exploring homosexual characters in those days.  She certainly deserved a recurring role more than arch-villain Blofeld whose primary prop was a white Persian cat.  I leave her off the list below, because Bond only met her as she was trying to kill him.  [Besides I have a separate list of Bond villains which includes the splendid Famke Janssen (Xenia Onatopp of Goldeneye who is also not on this list.]

Honor Blackman distinguished herself as a pilot in the third film, Goldfinger, and would have been remembered even without the remarkable moniker: “Pussy Galore.”  Personally, I think that Blackman should have been brought back for the latest set.  Daniel Craig is so far from the original idea of Bond that he should have been introduced as the illegitimate son of Bond and Galore.  The script could have explained that the bastard child appropriated his father’s name as a means of asserting his heritage and thumbing his nose the original Bond, who ignored him.  Blackman could have made a cameo as his mother.  It would have explained everything.

Diana Rigg (Tracy Draco) was the only woman who married Bond, but since she was murdered immediately after the reception, there was no chance for progeny.  Meanwhile, although my admiration for Rigg is boundless, her heart was not in this role, and while her performance might have been good enough for George Lazenby’s Bond, Tracy would not have been a credible match for Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan or even Roger Moore. 

 Connery brought out the best in his leading ladies.  Jill St. John (Tiffany Case), for instance, sparkles amid the otherwise drab storyline of Diamonds Are Forever.  She also displays the best figure of any who  caught 007’s eye.

In contrast, while Jane Seymour (Solitaire) and Maud Adams (Octopussy) were satisfactory for the laidback Roger Moore, Moore just didn’t generate the same sizzle that Connery did and as a result most reviewers don’t appreciate the actresses in Moore’s films.  Tanya Roberts (Stacey Sutton) never looked better than she did in A View to a Kill, but also suffered from the Moore malaise.  She didn’t even get a double-entendre name.  Corinne Clery (Corinne Dufour) was an actress who could have brought some heat to Moonraker but was woefully under utilized. Caroline Munro (Naomi) was the best part of The Spy Who Loved Me, but her time on screen can be counted in seconds. Clery and Munro were both pilots—presumably as a response to women’s lib--who met untimely ends.  Many other people seem to like Barbara Bach (Anya Amazova) who was The Spy Who Loved Me (not me actually—him--and just as well).  Anya was a Russian who joined Bond to save the world from yet another megalomaniac, but was as unconvincing as the steel-toothed killer, Jaws.

 Skipping over the Timothy Dalton films, because they deserve to be skipped over, we were delighted to find Sophie Marceau (Electra) with Pierce Brosnan.  The World is Not Enough but Marceau is, going from bereaved to magnate to villainess.  Most of Bond’s women went the other way, becoming good after a romance with the hero.  Electra, however, liked the dark side. 

 Another splendid woman entered the series with Brosnan. Judi Dench as the new M was much more hands on that the old, male M.  She stands up to her operative more, and is even kidnapped in The World Is Not Enough.  Not many bosses will give an employee the chance to save their lives.  (There are probably some good reasons for that.)

 Halle Berry (Jinx) in Die Another Day, like Andress before her, also made a spectacular bikini-clad entrance from the surf, and was an espionage equal to Bond (like Bach), but was better at both.  Why Berry chose to do Catwoman instead of returning in a Jinx-based feature I’ll never understand.  Of course, it’s not too late.

 If there was a departure from the “normal” Bond woman, it was Michelle Yeoh (Wai Lin) in Tomorrow Never Dies.  Yeoh was not a fugitive from a catwalk, and she could kick ass even better than Bond.

Here then are my top ten:  1. Lois Maxwell, 2. Michelle Yeoh 3. Sophie Marceau 4. Halle Berry  5.  Daniela Bianchi 6. Judi Dench  7. Honor Blackman 8. Barbara Bouchet  9. Deborah Kerr  10.  Jill St. John

 

After them, it’s largely a beautiy contest and a matter of taste.

 [Someday I will discuss the top ten villains.]

Late Review

Although Bowling for Columbine was released 6 years ago, I only saw it last week.  Since it is now on television, maybe its current again.  Maybe not.  The reason that I didn’t see it earlier is that I don’t like Michael Moore.  His heart may be in the right place, but his films lose focus and fly in a dozen directions. Columbine is no exception.  As a film, it sucks.  As a polemic, it’s pointless.

 He begins by wanting to ban guns because guns kill people.  It’s a valid point to argue.  He paints lurid pictures of the tragedy of Comumbine and of the 6-year-old girl who was gunned down in his home town by a classmate.  Children killing children is a terrible reflection on society.  People in Europe and Japan do not murder each other like that.

 Then, the argument falls apart.  Canadians have lots of guns and still don’t murder each other at anything approaching the same rate that we in the U.S. do.  So, guns alone are not the problem.  He asks gun advocates why this is.  They don’t know, and Moore has the satisfaction of making them appear foolish.  If he had asked gun opponents the same question, they would not have looked any better.  Moore, himself, doesn’t have a clue.

When someone suggests that our frontier past has left a residual acceptance of violence, he quickly goes back to Europe for clips of Nazis marching and of Japanese soldiers shooting prisoners.  See, these folks have violent pasts, too.

The point that he misses is that his examples of non-U.S. violence are all committed by the military.  However atrocious, it is sanctioined government violence.  To find rampant violence by private citizens, he would have had to go back to the French Revolution or other times when the governments of long established societies broke down.  The frontier tradition is about people acting individually because the government and its agents of order were a long way off.  

For the other thing that Moore missed, he didn’t look at a map.  Europe and Japan are approximately on the same latitude with Canada.  Worldwide, folks in northern climes are less violent than those in more temperate zones.  I remember a newspaper cartoon that I saw in Riga that compared the three Baltic countries, north to south.  Estonia, near Finland, was represented by a husband and wife in traditional dress with the wife holding a rolling pin and the husband with a lump on his head.  Latvia was represented by a similar couple, but the husband had two lumps.  Lithuania in the south was also represented by a couple in traditional costume, but the wife’s skillet had produced three lumps on the husband’s skull.  This was how the people in that part of the world viewed themselves.

 I went through Army basic training in August in South Carolina.  The drill instructors took pains to watch for conflicts and came down hard on those who even argued because the sergeants and officers knew from experience that hot weather was associated with more fights and other disruptive behavior among recruits.

At least one of the interviewees suggested that our heterogenious population held the key, but Moore’s liberal biases wouldn’t let him entertain that notion.  Yet, there may be something there.  Communities with a strong sense of kinship are usually less violent.  I’ve lived in cities where I didn’t even know my neighbors.  We didn’t shoot or even shout at each other, but there wasn’t a sense of support either.

 I have had handguns in my house since my children were in single digits.  They’re grown now and none of my weapons has ever been fired at a human being, not accidentally, not on purpose.  I was not a perfect father, and my kids had the normal range of behavior and emotional problems growing up, but nobody thought of my guns as the answer.

 In short, Moore was right that there is something wrong with a society in which children shoot children.  Then, he tried to blame the death of a 6-year-old girl  in Flint, Michigan on an aging Charlton Heston.  Disgraceful.  Moore gives college drop-outs a bad name.

 In lieu of communities where neighbors look after each other--Amish-style—we need to create programs that pay more attention to the needs of youth and the deficiencies of parents.   Intervention must occur long before a troubled person even thinks of picking up a gun or other weapon.  Government agencies from schools to police to social services must form a seamless network to anticipate and prevent problems.  Since we can’t do that and cut taxes, too, we need to accept that a certain number of lives will continue to be cut short by violence.  

Reviving Imperial Russia

The story of Russia has been one of expansionism and the supression of ethnic minorities.  Of course, Russians will say that has also been the story of the United States, or Great Britain, or Spain and Portugal in days gone by, or--  No matter, the crimes of others do not excuse our own.  Actually, Russia should have taken a lesson from the U.S. adventure in Iraq.  It has screwed us up royally.  In so many ways.  Economically, militarily, socially, diplomatically, politically—name the category, and the Iraq war has made it worse.

But, this was all Georgia’s fault, wasn’t it?  They “invaded” South Ossetia.  I watch Russia Today on tv—at least I did until I choked on its bias.  Several non-Russian sources have observed that Russia was preparing for the conflict weeks before the Georgian assault.  Cyber attacks on official Georgian websites began weeks before the Georgian attack.  That should not be a surprise.  The surprise would be if the FSB (formerly KGB) did not have assets within the government of a former possesion.

The question is whether the FSB spies in Georgia merely tipped off the Kremlin, or had a hand in encouraging the Georgians to act.  Whose idea was it really to shell South Ossetia prior to the troop assault? Georgia and President Saakashvili had become a thorn in Russia’s side.  Putin and Medvedev  needed a good excuse to make an example of Georgia.  The FSB is alleged to have bombed Russian apartment buildings to provoke anti-Chechen sentiments, they are certainly capable of setting up Saakashvili to provoke a Russian response.

But, let's be generous and suppose that the initial attack was all Georgian—and the Russians were content to let it happen before responding.  How is taking control of an internal provice an “invasion?”  If Bush sent troops to put down a separatist rebellion in Minnesota, would that be an “invasion?”  Did the Russians “invade” Chechenia?

The whole world reacted with shock and horror at the brutality meeted out to the Chechens, but no-one suggested that foreign military should be used to stop what was an internal matter.  So it is with South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  Russia has no business intervening.  What would they do if North Ossetia wanted independence?

Another thing I find curious is that we still don’t have any hard casualty figures from the Russian invasion of Georgia although there are estimates of the number of refugees.  In the confusion and chaos, I can understand the difficulty of compiling numbers.

But, look at what happened in South Ossetia.  Of the 50,000 people living there, 30,000 fled to the north and yet within 24 hours, Russia had concluded that 2,000 Ossetians had been killed by the Georgians.  Amid all the confusion, someone had compiled the numbers.  Have you seen pictures of dead Ossetians?  I’m sure there are some—but 2,000?   I predict that the real casualties will prove to be much fewer than advertised.

The Russians haven’t bothered counting the dead Georgians in Ossetia.

Meanwhile, there is an old Russian saying that “Paper takes any writing.”  Treaties and ceasefire agreements mean nothing to them.  The Russian leadership knows that no-one is going to oppose them on the ground, so they can do whatever they want.  And say whatever they want.

Stalin—who was Georgian, by the way—committed many atrocities.  In 1932-33, he forcibly starved some 11 million Ukrainians and Russians to death.  But, he took great pains to hide this crime from the rest of the world.  He even arranged for a New York Times reporter to tour selected areas.  The Times reporter wrote glowing reports about happy collective farmers, while a few miles away—safely out of his sight—the worst atrocity in history was taking place.

Compare that with statements from today’s Russian leaders who openly mock the idea of Georgian sovereignty.  In a public speech Medvedev referred to Georgians with a slang word, mozgoyov, that the news station translated as “these people” but actually is a rude obscenity roughly meaning “’brain-screwed.”  The combination of former FSB and oligarchs in executive positions has resulted in incredibly arrogant policies.

Meanwhile, Russian ships have blocked oil ships leaving Poti, and blockaded Ukrainian ships in Sevastapol.  This is not the end of an ugly episode, but the beginning of a Russian assertion of hegemony throughout the region.  Russian success in Georgia will have unpleasant repercussions around the region.

Ian Fleming is 100

Today is the one hundredth birthday of author and creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming.  I’ve read all of the Bond books (at least all of the ones written by Fleming—another author was contracted to continue the series).  And, I have all of the movies on DVD.  I can’t say that Fleming was the best author of his time—Live and Let Die is horribly awkward—but he pitted his hero against megalomaniacs who were trying to take over the world.  This elevation of the enemy as much as the sophistication and invincibility of the hero made the Bond franchise the success it became.  After Hitler and Stalin, the world did not have trouble believing in madmen who had not only the will, but the means to subjugate the rest of humanity.  Fleming tapped into this fear and made it entertaining.  He changed the nature and size of adventure fiction.

 

A few years ago, I visited the place where it all began.  The house where Fleming wrote Dr. No, the first in the series, is now a café.  It hugs the side of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, 4,200 feet above sea level.  Access is via a former goat path, now mostly paved but still steep and too narrow for two cars to pass without both going onto the shoulder—when there is a shoulder. The asphalt is pitted with gaping potholes and sometimes has sections washed away. But, for those who make it to this modest structure, it is all worthwhile.  Far above the bustle of the island, and in the cool air of the mountain, surrounded by lush green foliage, the Gap Café, as it is now called, is still a wonderful place to get away from distractions.  Blue Mountain coffee, the best in the world, is served in individual French press coffee pots on white table linens.  Outside the windows, hummingbirds hover around feeders.  I don’t know what to believe about Fleming’s wartime adventures or his romances, I envy his choice of a place to write and appreciate this opportunity to recall and share a fond memory.

Quote from The Great Dictator

I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible: Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. On the world is room for everyone. The good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance, but left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life would be violent. We all would be lost.
The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, the unity of us all. Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. Millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
For those who can hear me, I say: Do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear human progress, the hate of men who will pass. And, dictators die. The power they took from the people will return to the people. And, so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers, don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives—tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate. Only the unloved hate—the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery. Fight for liberty. In the seventeenth chapter of the Book it is written, the kingdom of God is within man—not one man or a group of men, but in all men. You—you the people—have the power: the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give man a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age security.
By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But, they lie. They do not fulfill their promise. They never will.
Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people.
Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, and hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
--Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

Looking for a fresh twist

Forgive my digression (or don’t) away from current events to rant about Hollywood. This weekend I saw Hide and Seek (2005) with Robert DeNiro, and Perfect Stranger (2007) with Halle Berry. Although these films began differently, they both had the same twist at the end. Without giving it away, they used an ending previously seen in Secret Window (2004) starring Johnny Depp, The Others (2001) starring Nicole Kidman, The Sixth Sense (1999) starring Bruce Willis, and Angel Heart (1987) starring Mickey Rourke. Maybe you can think of some that I missed.

I have long grown accustomed to television shows that seem to copy plot lines from each other, and I have excused that because TV is a ravenous beast that requires feeding 24 hours a day. But, I expect big budget movies to do better.

Unfortunately, it seems that Hollywood is creatively incestuous. For instance, back in the 1960’s someone thought it would be funny to have an elderly woman spewing profanities. Nowadays, it is as rare in the movies to find an elderly person with a civil tongue as it is to find a leading man or woman who is overweight.

In any event, I can accept most formulaic plot lines. The old boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-couple-reconciles stories still resonate. The action hero who wins in the early acts, then faces certain defeat just before his final triumph never gets old. These familiar stories are driven by character, situation and action. Plot is a lesser consideration. However, when the plot is primary, when a story is dependent on surprise twists and turns, I lose patience with a writer who borrows his denoument from Sophocles, who used it in Oedipus Rex about 430 B.C. I think it is time to put that twist to bed for another generation.