History in politics. Post I. Immigration, crime and strife.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

The Five Points Gang of New York City, which was formed as an Irish American gang, but under the leadership of Italian born "Paul Kelly", Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli.  The gang evolved from an entirely Irish gang into an Italian gang, reflecting demographic trends in Five Points.

Well, first of all, I also said there were a lot of benefits to that wave of immigration, but has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? That’s what I’m talking about. We know that when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.

* * *

What happens when you have massive amounts of illegal immigration? It actually starts to create ethnic conflict. It creates higher crime rates.

J. D. Vance

Is Vance right?

Keep in mind, I'm just basically fact checking here, not trying to make a political point.

Secondly, Gangs of New York is a horrible motion picture and historically inaccurate.¹

So let's start with the two basic assertions.  When you have:

• massive ethnic enclaves it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates; and
• massive amounts of illegal immigration creates ethnic conflict and higher crime rates.

Are these assertions correct, based on the historical data?

On the surface, a person could certainly argue yes.   The US Mafia was, at its core, an ethic gang. So was the US expression of the Camorra, as were the Chinese Tongs, and as are the various Mexican gangs sometimes loosely referred to as the "Mexican Mafia".  All of these entities found their first expression amongst ethnic groups that immigrated into the US, from Sicily, Italy, China and Mexico respectively, and retained their ethnic character thereafter.  And the US also saw, in the late 19th Century and into the mid 20th, Irish gangs and Jewish gangs, the latter two of which are largely forgotten.

But then, in examining it, there have also been African American gangs, and still are, as well as Hispanic gangs made up of American born Hispanics.

And, while we commonly do not think of it in this fashion, there have been domestic native born European American gangs.  The James Gang was made up entirely of Missourians and was widely tolerated in rural Missouri.  The Wild Bunch was a criminal gang with rotating members headquartered in Wyoming and made up entirely of whites.  Any number of Depression Era gangs out of Missouri and Oklahoma could also be named.

Hmmm. . . . 

So what can we draw from this.

The common element in all of this is poverty.  The common thread in the formation of all gangs, at their onset, is that their membership is poor, originally.  Gaining wealth is a primary motivating force of gang formation.

Gangs go right to crime, obviously, to address their lack of wealth.  The next element of it, however, is that they do form, originally, based on commonality, with the common element being shared ethnicity and status.  The Mafia formed originally in Sicily, an impoverished region of what is now Italy, for complicated and obscure reasons, but Sicilian ethnicity was obviously an element of it, and that element was imported into the US.  The Camorra was (and is) Neapolitan, and was when it came into the US.²  Sicilians and Neapolitans made up part of the impoverished Italian community that immigrated into the US in the late 19th Century and early 20th Centuries.  Indeed, the criminal organizations associated with them basically re-formed in the US, rather than being directly imported.

The James Gang sprang up from impoverished post Civil War rural Missouri with every single memer of it being a white, Protestant, Missourian.  The Rollins 40 Crips and the Bloods came from impoverished African American neighborhoods.  The Zetas and the Sinolas came out of impoverished communities in Mexico.

So, poverty is an early major motivator.

Poverty, combined with ethnic identity, creates the basic constituents for ethnic gangs.  It is, quite frankly, evolutionary biology at work.  Humans are tribal by nature, and form tribes in order to acquire and protect resources.  Gangs do that, operating in a world in which the members are outsiders due to their poverty and ethnicity.

But therein lies their weakness as well.

Over time, the ethnicity normally dissipates, and its always the case that the members of gangs are a minority of any one ethnicity.  Indeed, gangs tend to terrorize the members of their own ethnicities far more than anyone else.  As the economic fortunes of the ethnic class rise, being a member no longer retains its original benefits.  While being a gang member might offer wealth, it also offers a high risk of shortened life. At a certain point that is a decreasing benefit to the ethnic cohort.  To a very large degree this is why the Camorra has largely disappeared in the US, the Mafia is a shadow of its former self, and why Irish and Jewish gangs simply no longer exist.

And ethnicities, moreover, dissipate.  To be in the Mafia, originally, you had to be of straight Sicilian descent in the US. Now you must have some Sicilian descent, but it's a decreasing amount.³ 

So, there's some truth to what Vance related about immigration and crime, but its a much more complicated picture than he relates.

What about ethnic conflict?

Well, as noted part of human nature is tribalism, and an interesting aspect of that is that the "different" both repels and attracts.  Large immigrant groups usually do cause some consternation in a prior group, no matter what it is, but contacts nearly immediately arise.  Indeed the relatively accurate historical novels Giants In The Earth and Peder Victorious by Ole Edvart Rølvaag do a good job of demonstrating that as, in his novels, a Lutheran Norwegian immigrant family is at first horrified by a Catholic Irish immigrant family moving into their region, only to have a child, Peder, marry into it.  Entire ethnicities, such as Creoles in the US and the Mexicans of Mexico are the result of intermixing of cultures.  The degree to which a culture is hostile to this varies, with some being very hostile to it, and others not so much.  Even where there's pretty strong resistance, however, it happens.

Strife, however, between two cultures in one reason also tends to have a strong common element, that being, once again, poverty.  When hostility breaks out between two ethnic groups in a region, it usually features a very strong element of poverty, so in a way, its once again scarcity of resources that is the common problem.

Where's that leave us on Vance's assertion?

Well, its not completely untrue in a superficial way, but in a really in depth manner, its poverty that's the problem.  So what we really are looking at is an economic topic, or should be.

Footnotes:

1.  Gangs of New York is not only historically inaccurate, its downright perverse.

The movie depicts the New York borough of Five Points in the 1840 through 1860s with a Nativist Protestant gang fighting an Irish Catholic gang, the Dead Rabbits (which was in fact a real gang).  New  York ethnic gangs in fact existed, but the conglomeration of nativist feelings, Irish immigration in general and Irish gangs is way over the top.

In terms of oddities, Daniel Day Lewis character is just weird.

2.  In fact, all the Italian criminal gangs come out of southern Italy, a region of Italy which has been historically impoverished and still is to a significant degree.

3.  A movie that depicts this really well is Goodfellas.

Last edition:

History in politics. A new trailing series of threads

Labels: History in politics, Politics

Saturday, July 1, 1899. "Birth" of Indiana Jones.

According to George Lucas, this is the birthdate for his fictional character, Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.

Last edition:

Friday, June 30, 1899. Safe passage for Spanish troops at Baler.

Labels: 1890s, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1900s, Army, Philippine Insurrection, Philippines, Prisoners of War, Spanish American War, Spanish Army, U.S. Navy

Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet On the Western Front).

 

He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The last two paragraphs of All Quiet On The Western Front. 

I've never reviewed All Quiet on the Western Front, even though I'd long ago seen the prior two versions.  I just saw the newest, German made, production of the book, which in Germany was released under the novel's German title, Im Westen nichts Neues, which literally translates as "in the West nothing new".*

All Quiet On The Western Front has a reputation as being the greatest anti-war novel ever written.  I'm sorry to say that I haven't actually read it, which I'll have to do.  Indeed, the recent German made version of the novel sort of compels me to do so.

The novel was first adapted to film in 1930 in an American version, which is a great film in its own right.

It was later adopted to a television in 1979, in another version that is very well regarded.  In 2022 this German version was released and shown on Netflix.  My original intent was to review just that version, but you really can't.  You have to review all three.

The best of the three is frankly the first one, although it does suffer from being a film that, due to cinematography, and due to pacing, hasn't aged as well as it should have.  It's hard not to watch the 1930 version and not, at least at first, appreciate that you are watching an old film.  

Still, this version sets the story at well, and perhaps with more than a degree of unintended irony in that the film came before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1932, and therefore the early scene of enthusiastic school boys being eager for the war were ominous, retrospectively.  It's a gritty, good protrayal.

The 1979 television version is good as well, but frankly I just couldn't quite get around Richard Thomas in the role of the main protagonist, Paul Bäumer.  Lew Ayres was better in that role.  For that matter, Ernest Borgnine, who almost always turned in a good performance, did in the 1979 version as well, but he's just way too old for the German NCO Stanislaus Katczinsky he portrays.  For that matter, Louis Robert Wolheim really was as well, at age 50, but he carries the role off better, even though he was within a year of his own death at the time.

Anyhow, Thomas was so whiny, in a way, in The Waltons that I just can't get around that in this film, which really isn't his fault.  I just can't see him going from a green, naive recruit to a hardened combat veteran.

Which takes us to the new production.

This is the first German production of the film, and it shows it.  The production values in the film are absolutely excellent.  the material details are superb and. . . . the plot massively departs from the novel.

And for that reason, frankly, it suffers.  

This film really carries the post World War Two German guilt/excuse into a World War One work that was a novel.  It doesn't, therefore, really get Remarque's warning about militarism across, so much as it portrays average Germans as victims of the Great War and future victims of the Second World War.  The death of Katczinsky, which is a completely pointless combat death in the novel and first two films, is a weird murder by a French child in this version.  

And the ending of this movie departs massively from the novel and looses the point of it.  The protagonist dies on a quiet day, like thousands of soldiers did.  In the new German version he died in a  massive late war German assault at the end of the war.  That's completely different.  

For that matter, that's a major departure from actual history and it ties in, just a tad, to the Stabbed In the Back myth. The Germans had an ongoing revolution at home and the Frontsoldaten were collapsing. You couldn't have ordered them into an attack in late 1918 no matter how hard you tried.

So, the first version is the best.  I don't think I could get through the second again, and the third version is worth watching, once.

*This review was started in October, 2022.

Tuesday, August 22, 1923. Oaths of Office, Air Mail, No French Concessions, Japanese Navy Disaster, Societal Shifts.

Calvin Coolidge was administered the oath of office for the second time because of a question of whether the presidential oath had to be administered by a federal official. Judge Adolph A. Hoehling Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia administered did the honors this time, at the  Willard Hotel.

The Coolidge's then moved into the White House later that day.

I'm amazed that our disgraced former business magnate President didn't think of having a notary at the bank or something administer another oath to him.

Mail was getting speedier.

France informed Britain that it would not make concessions on the Ruhr.

Kalamazoo, Michigan banned dancers from staring into each other's eyes.

This sounds absurd, of course, but society was having a difficult time figuring out how to adjust to the arrival of dating.  It didn't come in all at once, of course, but the arrival of modern dating, principally in control of the dating couples or prospective couples, had increased enormously following World War One.

We've dealt with it extensively here before, but the 1920s really saw the onset of domestic machinery which would end up changing women's relationship with work.  And it also saw a dramatic rise in the number of young women who lived outside their parent's homes, or who were semi-independent of their parent's household.  FWIW, a really good portrayal of this can be found in A River Runs Through It, in a rural setting, which is of course a memoir of this period.  Much of this would be arrested with the arrival of the Great Depression, which retarded the advance of household appliances of all sorts, and sent many young people, male and female, back into their parent's households.

Among the difficulties being adjusted to were the morality problems the shift presented.  Now presented as quaint, they really were not and were not easily instantly adjusted to, and in some ways can be argued to have never been worked out.  We may in fact be in the final stages of working them out now.  An item from yesterday demonstrated an aspect of that, being the rise of pornography before there was any consensus on how to address that, which there still really is not.

The Imperial Japanese Navy's submarine 70 sank in a disaster, killing 88 of its men.  She was swamped by a passing ship with her hatch open.  Only six men survived, including her commanding officer.

Six men sawed their way out of the Natrona County jail.

Sawing your way out of a jail window is such a Western movie trope that it's odd to read of it actually being done.

Related Threads:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

El Alamein, (Tanks of El Alamein)

This is a 1957 Italian movie that's almost completely unknown to English speaking audiences.

It's surprisingly good.

The film surrounds the raising of, and training of, an actual well known Italian paratrooper unit, going through the early training of the film and the personalities of the soldiers followed in the film.  Some are conscripts, some are men who have been recalled from earlier service, including the first character who is introduced who is a monastic friar, and some new recruits. Their airborne training is explored and well done.  After they are fully trained as paratroopers, they are deployed to North Africa, which the actual unit really was.  It fights to its destruction at the Battle of El Alamein.

In some ways, the movie is a typical 1950s war movie, but more effort was expended on the prolonged tank battle scenes than normal.  Clearly making use of the Italian army at the time, the tanks depicted are a mix of M4 Sherman's and M47s.  Large numbers of tanks are used, and period fighter aircraft (although I could not identify them) are as well.  The movie is very well done.

In terms of historical accuracy, here too I don't know enough about Italian, or Axis units in general, at El Alamein to know how accurately this is depicted, but it does involve a real unit that was in fact basically destroyed in the battle.  Other armies, including the German and the British Army, are nearly dealt within the abstract, a fact assisted in that the British, with some exceptions, are depicted principally as armored formations so actual encounters with identifiable human beings are fairly rare.  Equipment wise, the movie seems largely accurate on the Italian side, although the number of submachineguns used by the Italian paratroops is presumed to be heavily exaggerated.

This is an almost loving portrayal of the unit that is completely apolitical, which may be one of its faults.  These men, in real life, were fighting for Mussolini, but in the movie neither Mussolini or fascism are ever mentioned.  They're basically portrayed as men doomed to a tragic fate, which in a way they were, but in wars, there is always a larger picture.

Worth seeing, and something that we rarely actually see portrayed, that being a unit history, like that given in Platoon, of an Axis unit in World War Two.

Movies In History: The Wild Geese

Some time ago I started listening to the excellent Fighting On Film podcast by two British gentlemen.  It's excellent.

This 1978 movie is one of the first movies they reviewed, and apparently it has an enormous cult following in the UK, particularly amongst military movie fans and British servicemen.  It's a guilty pleasure of mine, and I was surprised to find that I'd never reviewed it.

Set in the 1970s at the tail end of the mercenary era in Africa, the plot involves a group of British mercenaries, all with British Army backgrounds, who are recruited to serve in a commando mission to free a secretly imprisoned African leader.  Outfitted with merchant banker money, the band assembled in the UK and trains in Africa, outfitted in period British uniforms (but with the members retaining the berets and cap badges of their old units), and generally European NATO firearms of the era.  They preform their mission of rescuing the president, only to be betrayed, and then must fight their way, basically, to Rhodesia.

Coming just at the end of that period in time in which there had been in fact a lot of European mercenaries with roles in Africa, and in fact advised by "Mad" Mike Hoare, who was one of the more famous ones, the film had a certain air of credibility to it.  It's loved, as noted, by British military film aficionados.

Frankly, the film ain't great.

It has a good cast, including Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris and Hardy Kruger.   The rough outline of the plot, taken from a novel, isn't bad.  The equipment is fascinating.  

But, the production values are frankly low, and the actors, save for Kruger and Moore, are past their prime and not credible in their roles at all. Burton, as Col. Faulkner, was well into his alcoholic demise at the time and looks like he'd not make it more than a few 100 yards into the bush.  Harris, who looked vibrant a decade prior in Major Dundee, doesn't look much better.  It just doesn't work.

Still, like Major Dundee (which is much better), there's just enough there, there, that the film is worth watching and somehow compelling.  It's heavily flawed, but you can almost see the move that might have been.

In terms of historical accuracy, we'll just note that there was a lot of mercenary action in Africa in the 60s and 70s as the old European empires fell apart.  Professional European soldiers, not all of them the most reputable, found roles in those wars, most notably in the Congo.  A certain cache developed about them that found itself expressed in novels and films, with this being one of the better known ones.

In terms of material details, the producers of this film chose to outfit the actors as if they were a British army unit of the time, and they look like one.  That probably isn't how an actual mercenary outfit would look, but as is often noted about this film, these guys do look good in the uniforms, physical decline aside.  The weapons chosen are a mixture of older British pattern uniforms and selective fire FALS, which are clearly not being really fired, as the recoil from a FAL on full automatic is pretty heavy.

All in all, it's entertaining, but not great.

Movies In History: Quo Vadis

I was recently forced to spend some semi idle time in front of the television.  For reasons, I can't really explain, if I'm sick or injured, I don't read much.  I will listen to things like podcasts, and I'll watch television, but I don't do much reading.

Anyhow, during that period, I watched this 1951 "epic".  The plot surrounds a returning Roman general, Marcus, during Nero's reign who comes back from a long extended campaign just in time to experience, over a few weeks, the arrival in Rome of St. Peter and the great fire of Rome.

Condensing years of history into a few weeks, the plot is frankly improbable.  Marcus returns from campaign and stays at the house of a retired Roman general who has converted to Christianity.  He meets St. Paul there, but doesn't appreciate who he is.  He also meets Lygia, a captive in the household who was raised by her captors as their adoptive daughter, who is also a Christian.  In a matter of seeming hours, Marcus falls deeply in love with Lygia and vice versa, which leads to some drama.  Marcus is present when St. Peter preaches, having just arrived in Rome, but remains unconvinced.  Nero has Rome torched when he's at his out of the city estate, and Marcus races back, ending up being thrown in confinement with the Christians blamed for the fire. He saves Lygia and causes a Roman army to revolt against Nero.

This film was well regarded in 1951, but it's really just too thin on plot now.  Indeed, darned near any Roman epic save for Ben Hur really suffers in viewing.

Usually, I review these films for historical accuracy and material details. I really can't do that in regard with Roman material details, as I don't know enough about ancient Rome of this period to do so.  In terms of historic accuracy, Rome did suffer near destruction in a fire during Nero's reign, and he was blamed for it.  The Christians were too.  It was frankly most likely just a fire that spread by accident that was inevitable, given the conditions of the city at the time.  Nero, who became Emperor at an absurdly young age was emblematic of what was wrong with Rome at the time, but he was probably not as weird as portrayed in the film by Peter Ustinov, who really does steal the show with his depiction.  Christians were persecuted under Nero, but Nero's demise didn't come about in this fashion.

St. Peter did suffer execution, it is more than worth noting, following the great fire in 64.  The title of the film comes from St. Peter's encounter with Jesus outside of Rome, as he fled persecution there, with his encountering the risen Christ and, in the Latin translation, asking "Quo vadis?", to which Jessu replied "Romam eo iterum crucifigī", or "Where are you going", and "I am going to Rome to be crucified again".  This caussed Peter to return to Rome.

A much better film could have been made out of all of this, but at the time this one was highly regarded.  One thing of note is that it would be hard to make a Hollywood blockbuster of this type now, as this film was 100% Christian in outlook.

The Professionals. A second review.

As recently noted here, Fighting On Film just dropped a podcast episode on The Professionals.  I reviewed that film back in 2015, along with a collection of others, in which I stated:

The Professionals

This film from the 1960s is in the star packed genera, which many films of this period were.  Featuring Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, Burt Lancaster, and others, the film is set in the Mexican Revolutionary period, with a plot centered on American soldiers of fortune being hired by a wealthy rancher to retrieve his kidnapped wife.

All in all, this film is pretty entertaining and is done pretty well.   In terms of history, it has some interesting features including the fluid nature of the border and the confusing  nature of Mexican revolutionary forces. The film has an offhand referenced to the "Colorados", who were an actual faction in the Mexican Revolution and who were followers of Pascual Orozco, and who fought for Modero at first and then switched to Huerta against him.  This would also place the film in the 1913 to 1915 time frame and would place the revolutionaries generally depicted in the film into some category of Villistas, more or less. 

The firearms in the film are period correct, and small details, such as Marvin's clothing (he's supposed to be a former professional soldiers) show some surprisingly small scale correct details that are generally omitted in films in this period.  One of the better films of this type.

I try to go more in depth in my reviews now, which is why I'm never current on them, sad to say.  

This film is one of my favorites and it sort of stands, in my view, as a bookend to The Wild Bunch, which was reviewed in the same original collective post.  In looking back, I notice that I noted what Fighting On Film did about Lee Marvin's "drip".  I didn't notice, but it's very evident in the film, how realistic, period correct, and almost acrobatic Marvin's handling of firearms is in the movie.

Fighting On Film places this movie in about 1920, which is likely correct, which makes it a true Fin de Siècle, passing of the frontier west film.  Indeed, it's really almost past it.  It's an excellent film, one which I've watched many times.  Given that, I'm surprised to see that I didn't mention, when I originally reviewed it, that the movie, based on a novel serialized in the Rocky Mountain News (A Mule for the Marquessa) and features bombshell Italian actress Claudia Cardinale in it.  Fighting On Film hardly mentioned her either, FWIW.  She's the one weak role in the whole film and is frankly there as window dressing.  There was no effort at all to do anything about her extraordinarily thick Italian accent, even though Jack Palance, playing "Raza", a Villa like character, has an affected one, and Marie Gomez, a Mexican actress who also played roles in American television, a genuine one.  Indeed, Gomez's English, while accented, is crystal clear, whereas Cardinale's English is not.

The Fighting On Film website has a link to an original poster or theater card from the movie, which would lead to protests today, as it depicts Cardinale so stripped down that it's effectively a poster emphasizing her breasts over anything else.  It probably realistically demonstrated why she was in the film in the first place, however.  Indeed, in at least one scene the film toyed with Gomez's portrayal in this fashion as well, going further than it did with Cardinale, but so briefly that it's almost not noticeable.  This latter fact is more than a little 60s misogynistic, but the casting of Cardinale was simply silly.  It's notable that in films today, moviemakers at least cast real Hispanic actresses in Hispanic roles and wouldn't get away with the Italian bombshell thing today.

In contrast, Woody Stroke, who was elevated to star status by this movie, was amazingly 52 years old when it was released.  I note this as he was clearly cast in part as he was a remarkable physical specimen, the only male character to be shown shirtless. At 52, he appeared much younger than his actual age.

Anyhow, this move is very well done.  The clothing, as noted, shows real attention to small details. The firearms are mixed and period correct.  Horses are shown not to be free of fatigue.  It's a good watch.

"Are you a Peaky Blinder?"

It was a joke said by a grocery store checker, who actually reached back over another line I wasn't in, in order to make it.  The reference was, of course, to the newsboy cap I was wearing, which is depicted here.

I wear it all the time.

I've worn newsboy caps for a long time.  When I first looked for them to wear, they were really hard to find, this being in the pre Internet days.  For a while I wore Kangol touring (golf) caps, which are sort of similar, but which are not the same thing.  I had a really nice red wool Kangol golf touring cap that's around here somewhere, probably still.  But then at some point in the early 1990s I found a Hanna Hats herringbone tweed newsboy that I wore out.  Around the same time I found a great Pendleton blue newsboy that had a leather brim, which I unfortunately left in the Seattle airport.  The hat depicted is the replacement for the earlier herringbone tweed cap, and is also an Irish Hanna Hats newsboy.

When I started wearing them, they were unusual, but I don't like baseball caps for a lot of wear, and a newsboy folds up.  They're a great cap.

Now you see them around, and the British television series Peaky Blinders is the reason why.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me.  I tend to wear some really old classics, A2 flight jackets, Levis jackets, ankle high Munson last boots, beaver felt broad brimmed hats, really old-fashioned cowboy boots, B3 flight jackets, M65 field jackets, etc.  I like clothing that's practical, not fashionable, functional and which last a long time.

In many instances when I've gone to these styles, I was pretty much alone in wearing them, or it was uncommon, only to later have them suddenly roar into fashion prominence.  It's a weird experience.

And when that happens, logically enough, people figure you are adopting a new popular style.  Such is now the case with newsboy caps.

The television show Peaky Blinders is a drama focused on the real world late 19th Century and early 20th Century criminal gang, the Peaky Blinders.  IMDB summarizes the show as such:

A gangster family epic set in 1900s England, centering on a gang who sew razor blades in the peaks of their caps, and their fierce boss Tommy Shelby.

In reality, the gang members did tend to wear newsboy or flat caps, which makes sense as pretty much every man in the urban working class did.

Thomas Gilbert, real world Peaky Blinder.

The real gang was on the decline by the 1910s, and so it wasn't the force depicted in the television series at the period of time in which it was set.  In the 1920s they disappeared entirely.  They were some really bad guys.

I've heard so much about the series, I decided to try to watch it.  I generally like British television and while I had previously tried to watch a snippet and failed, I teed it up to watch the first episode.

It's awful.

I can't give the entire series a fair review as I'm not going to watch it, but the first episode is just flat out bad and full of overdone British tropes.  You have your Irish Expats, and street Communists, and people mixing their faith with crime a la The Godfather, and of course Winston Churchill as a sort of government baddy, directing a police baddy.  It's not convincing on any of these items.

The haircuts are really weird too, but according to the British newspaper The Telegraph, that's accurate.  Enough people must have asked in order for them to write an article about it, in which they stated:

The Peaky Blinders haircut is historically accurate and has been a popular look since the 20th century, particularly amongst young working-class men.

The hair cut originated in interwar Glasgow, when the Neds (petty criminals), had a haircut which was long on the top and short at the back and sides.

In his book, My Granny Made Me An Anarchist, Stuart Christie details how the Glasgow Neds would use paraffin wax to keep the top part in place, despite the fire hazard.

Andrew Davies in his article Youth gangs, masculinity and violence in late Victorian Manchester and Salford explains members of street gangs in England also favoured the undercut hairstyle because long hair put them at a disadvantage during a street fight.

Well okay on the haircuts then, but overall, as to the series, ack.

And no, I'm not a Peaky Blinder.  I was wearing a newsboy before this series was ever thought of. 

Related threads:

Caps, Hats, Fashion and Perceptions of Decency and being Dressed.

ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas

I started my review here on this documentary a long time ago and failed to finish it for some reason.

Anyhow, this will be a surprising entry here, probably, but this "rockumentary" is on Netflix right now and it's worth watching.

I suppose I should qualify that by saying it's worth watching if you like ZZ Top. But maybe it's worth watching even if you don't.  Indeed, I sort of like the Clash, but there's a rockumentary out there on them that's really good, even if I can't recall its name.

Anyhow, this look at ZZ Top, filmed before the recent death of one of its members is a nice, and fannish, look at the band, it's origins and where it was just prior to the noted death.  It touches on their rise as a Southern Rock/Blues band into a rock band, including a period of time in which they sat out for a while and why they did so.

It's a nice look at the band, and better, frankly, than some documentaries of this type.  Worth watching.

Movies In History: Kleo

Kleo is a new, just released, German Netflix series.  I literally stumbled on it, as I haven't watched Netflix for a while, but I was temporarily idled due to medical fun and games and there was literally nothing worth watching on regular television.  I started watching it as it the summation of it on Netflix suggested it'd be the sort of movie I might like.  I like spy films and mysteries, and I'm not wholly adverse to shoot 'em ups, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they're superficial.

Well, it exceeded my expectation.

Set in the 1980s, the eight part series is frankly very difficult to describe.  It follows the story of East German female Stasi (East German state police) assassin Kleo Straub as she goes from being an "unofficial agent" of the Stasi whose job is killing targets they designate, to being set up and imprisoned, to being released in 1989 as East Germany begins to collapse, at which time she's dedicated to finding those who wrongly accused her and killing them.

And that's all just in the first episode.

Added to that, we have a failed West German policeman who was present in The Big Eden, a nightclub, the night that Kleo performs her last killing for the DDR, who can never get quite over it and who, upon Kleo's release, realizes that she's the woman he identified as the killer the night of the murder.

All of that doesn't do it justice, however.

The film features far more twists and turns than most spy movies, and makes the tricky loyalties in the John Wick films look like child's play. Kleo, the assassin herself, played by Jella Haase, is impossible not to like, even though she's clearly partially unhinged and trying to get through life with a badly damaged soul.  Sven Petzold, the detective, is dogged in his pursuit, but he's also hapless and somewhat incompetent in his job.  Indeed, as an example, it's obvious about halfway through the film that Sven at first deeply likes Kleo and then is falling in love with her even though she's so messed up that he has to at one point make her promise to quit killing people, which she does simply because he requests it, not because she has any real concept of right and wrong beyond being a dedicated Communist.

None of this, however, comes close to actually describing the plot.

In terms of its history, which is why we review certain films here, this film does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the times in Germany and Europe.  The East Germans, whom in this film are mostly those associated with the Communist government, can hardly gasp what is happening to them as their government collapses.  As many of them are its agents, they're dedicated to an institution that's collapsing for the most part, while some of them are rapidly moving on into capitalism.  The West Germans are pretty willing to take advantage of the situation.  More than that, however, West Germany is shown to have become a multicultural post Volk society, whereas East Germany has not, something even demonstrated by the actors chosen in the film.  All of the East German characters are figures that we'd recognize from classic films involving the Germans of World War Two, even though that is not what they are portraying. They're all very German (although some of the actors actually are not).  The West Germans, however, appear not only more modern and 1980s "cool", but many of them are clearly not ethnically German, that most obviously being the case for West German intelligence agent Min Sun, who is played by Chinese-born, but German raised, Yun Huang.

Backgrounds are correct for the period, including the funky German techno music that plays a role in the series.  Clothing is as well, with that also providing a difference between the East and the West.  Firearm wise the maker was careful to equip the East Germans with Soviet type handguns, whereas the West Germans carry the iconic German PPK.

The film includes reference to actual characters from the period, and not just in the greater sense of being background for the times.  The head of the East German police is a character in the film and not fictionalized as to name, for instance.  Margot Honecker, Erich Honecker's third wife, shows up as a character.  These insertions are done so well, that offhand references to fictional events become difficult to distinguish from ones that didn't happen, as in references to the "woman who attempted to kill Reagan" and the details of that event, which never occurred.

This being a German movie, it should be noted that there is seemingly an obligation that Haase be seen topless at some point.  In this case, the nudity is basically limited to a single scene, but it's quite graphic.  There must be a clause in the contracts for German actresses that they have to appear nude at some point in a film.

Anyhow, It's very well done and with watching.

As a note, this is a German language movie, but it has well done English subtitles.  An option to listen to it with British English dubbing is available, but I don't care for that much personally.  The subtitles are very close translations of the German, with departures due to German idioms that don't granslate perfectly.

Just 30 years.

Two nights ago, my wife and I, for no real reason, watched The Fugitive.

We'd seen it before.  I know I saw it at the move theater when it first ran in the early 90s.  Maybe the two of us saw it together then.

Anyhow, I was amazed, in watching it, to see the common wearing of neckties.

All the men were wearing them.

It doesn't seem that long ago.

Dog Fight

I haven't seen Power of the Dog.

I started to watch 1883, but I quit watching it as I couldn't get over the historic improbabilities.  That's why there's no review of it here.

As to 1883, my interest in it started to wane when it showed one of the protagonist engaged in a relatively short range gun fight, after being ambushed, using a scoped rifle.  Yes, there were scope rifles at the time, but they were exceedingly rare, quite delicate, and not really suitable for snap shooting.

But what really did it is when the Sam Elliot character is being recruited to lead a part of overland immigrants north from Texas.

In 1883, you could take the train. And why would you start from Texas in any event?  You would not.

Indeed, railroads leased out freight cars to immigrants, so they could dump whatever implements they had in them, and ride with them.

Yes, cattle were being driven overland, and some immigrants still took the Oregon Trail that late, but trailing up from Texas?

Anyhow, 1883 was a big deal with some viewers as Yellowstone, which I also have not seen, is a big deal with some viewers.  Sam Elliot reprised a role he's now typecast in as aged cowboy, with cowboy loosely defined.

Following that, Elliot was interviewed about the movie Power of the Dog, which I haven't seen and which I'm unlikely to.

More specifically, Elliot called the movie "a piece of shit".  He further noted, "They’re running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions of homosexuality throughout the movie.”

I've read the synopsis of the movie, which is billed as a "psychological Western", and it frankly reminds me a bit of Legends Of The Fall, which was an awful movie.  Maybe Elliot is right, and it is a "piece of sh**".  I have no idea, but I'm not going to bother with it.

But what I will note is that Elliot is right about shirtless riders. Wouldn't happen.  Then, as now, cowboys cover up, even in hot months.  You very rarely, at least up here, see a working cowhand wearing a short sleeve shirt.  Television cowboys might work in t-shirts, but real ones don't.

Going further, in one of the photos from the film, the protagonist is wearing overalls.  You won't see cowhands wearing those, either. That's strictly a farmer thing. They're not appropriate for riding, frankly.

As for his other comments, I'll leave them there, as I haven't seen the film.

The director, New Zealander Jane Campion, did react to Elliot, noting that he's not a real cowboy (true) and defended her work by stating:

The west is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist… I consider myself a creator and I think he sees me as a woman or something lesser first. And I don’t appreciate that.

As a Westerner (and a stockman) that's part of the problem  The West is no more a "mythic space" than New Zealand is and ought not to be treated that way.  Yes, it's been mythologized, and often badly, but that process is part of an instinctive way of preserving history.  It happens, we'd note, in all cultures, on some topic.

Power of the Dog, I'd note, was written by one Thomas Savage, whom I'd describe as a minor novelist.  But for this film, I've never heard of him, and I've never heard of any of his works.  To some degree, it seems like his career was sort revived by Anne Proulx, which is interesting.  Proulx gained  a following as a regional novelist from the Northeast, but then briefly lived in Wyoming, during which time she produced Brokeback Mountain, which I also have not seen. Even when she lived in Wyoming, apparently Saratoga, she spent part of the year in Newfoundland.  From here she went on to New Mexico, always a favorite haunt of artists, and is now in Washington state.

I note all of this because Proulx is prominent, or at least her one work is, in what might be regarded as an "anti-Western", which Power Of The Dog seems to be as well, perhaps.  That is, the authors of these works, in some ways, take Western themes and seek to turn them on their head.  In Savage's case, it seems he had an early exposure to ranching as a youth and young man, but never took to it, and then as a writer used it as a setting of criticism, with the dysfunctional family being the primary topic.

This stands out, I think, from works by authors like Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry wrote some very gritty novels, but they're quite true to life.  McMurtry also grew up on a ranch, in Texas, and while, like most novelist, his themes exaggerate, they're also fairly accurate as a rule.  His book Horseman, Pass By, is probably the best book written set in a modern setting, with its descriptions being incredibly true to life.

Less so, but still notable, are those of Cormac McCarthy, who tends to write things set in Texas, and has spent much of his life there, but who is from Rhode Island originally, showing that a person doesn't have to be from a place from infancy in order to pick up the feel of a place.

I guess what this gets to is three things, one is historical accuracy, a second is love of place, and the  third is love of subject.  In order to produce a really outstanding work, written or filmed, all three have to be there.

Now, I may be going further than I should on some of these works, as I haven't seen them all, but that's lacking, it seems to me, on some of these, and perhaps on the two ones that started this dog fight.  I know that people have been fawning over 1883, but frankly it just fails in the first category at least.  I think people love it as they love sappy dramas and from what I can pick up about it, without watching it, that's what Yellowstone is. People love Yellowstone, so they love 1883. Beyond that, some people love Sam Elliot and will watch anything he's in, and others love Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and finally some viewers, while they won't put it this way, find Isabel May hopelessly hot.  None of that makes the film great, or even good.  Nor does just simply taking Western stereotypes, which at least to some degree are stereotypes as they're based on reality, and turning them on their head. That can be done, to be sure, but just to do it, just does that, and not much else.

Classic WW2 Movies and Their Weird Tanks - Commentated

The Forgotten Battle (De Slag Om De Schelde)

Alligator amphibious vehicle passing Terrapin amphibious vehicle on the Schledt.

This is a 2020 Dutch film which has been released with dubbed English, in place of Dutch, on Netflix.

The Battle of the Scheldt, which this film deals with, is hardly a "forgotten" battle, but it is a battle which is no doubt more remembered by the Dutch and the Canadians than it is for Americans.  A continual complaint of European audiences is that American films tend to treat World War Two as if the United States was the only Allied nation in it.  The complaint really isn't true, as there are certainly plenty of contrary examples, but this film is a little unusual for an American audience as it doesn't involve the US at all, while still dealing with a very important battle.

The Battle of the Scheldt was an October 1944 to November 1944 series of Allied campaigns that were aimed at opening up control of the Scheldt estuary so that Allied shipping could make it to Antwerp.  Antwerp had been taken intact, but because the Germans controlled the banks of the Scheldt it was of no use to the Allies, which desperately needed the port.   The task fell to the Canadian army which, in a series of attacks beginning on October 2, 1944, and running through November 8, 1944, took the banks of the Scheldt. It was a hard fought campaign.

This fictionalized portrayal of those events are centered on three principal characters.  One is a Dutch a young Dutch woman,Teuntje Visser, played by Dutch actress and model Susan Radder, who comes into the underground basically both accidentally and reluctantly, a British paratrooper, William Sinclair, played by Jamie Flatters, and a young Dutchman who is a German soldier, Marinus van Staveren, played by Gijis Blom.  The story involves three intersecting plot lines in order to construct a story that involves the climatic battle.

The story actually starts off, surprisingly for a Dutch film, with the Van Staveren character, opening up with a battle on the Russian front.  Van Staveren, who is wounded in the battle, turns out to be a willing volunteer.  While the Dutch are justifiably remember for their opposition to the Nazis, a little over 20,000 Dutch citizens did serve in the German armed forces.  Cornelius Ryan noted in his book A Bridge Too Far that the number was significant enough that parents in some regions of the country worried about what to do with photographs of their sons in uniform taken while they were in the German Army.

Van Stavern is befriended by a mentally decaying wounded SS lieutenant in the same hospital who, as his last act, gets him transferred to a desk job in the west, in what turns out to be a unit that's going to Holland, his native country. That's where he first encounters Visser, who reports with her father to a newly appointed German commander who calls them in as he's aware that Visser's brother was involved in an incident in which he threw a camera through a windshield of a German truck, resulting in a fatal accident.

That ties into an earlier scene setting up that the brother is part of the Dutch underground.  We're introduced to the Visser's there while they watch the Germans retreating in a scene that's much reminiscent of the opening scenes of A Bridge Too Far.

William Sinclair we're introduced to in the context of the topic Ryan's book addresses. He's a British glider pilot in the British airborne whose glider is damaged over the Scheldt and is cut loose to crash on a flooded island.  This occurs before the offensive on the Scheldt commences and he and the party of men he is with try to make their way towards dry land and the Allies.  Sinclair eventually makes it to the Canadian army and is in the battle with it.

The stories all, as noted, intertwine.

The film is well presented and presents good, and credible, drama.  It's realistically portrayed but avoids the post Saving Private Ryan gore that American films have tended to engage in.  None of the characters, interestingly, is without significant personal failings, thereby presenting a much less heroic and more nuanced picture of people at war than is usually the case.  A Dutch film, the central portrayed Dutch characters all have significant personal defects and are not heroic. As a movie, its a good movie.

So how does it do on history?

Well, fairly good  It is a dramatized version of history, but the battle on the Scheldt did come after Market Garden and it was a Canadian effort, as the battle portrays.  The reasons for the battle are accurately presented.  It's nicely done.  Perhaps my only real criticisms are based on things that I don't know if they're accurate or not.  One is that the British paratrooper ends up fighting with the Canadians in Canadian uniform.  I tend to think that he would have simply been evacuated upon crossing into Allied lines.  And I'm skeptical that the Germans would have assigned a Dutch private in their service to a unit serving in Holland, as it opens up the obvious loyalty problem.  Having said that, this is speculation on my part.

In terms of material details, this film also does quite well.  Uniforms and equipment are all presented accurately  The glider scenes are unique for a film as far as I'm aware of, and are really horrifying.

So, well worth watching.

The World War Two Adventure Movies

War adventure movies?

Well, yes.

This is a category that I may be pioneering a bit, but it's relevant to the way our blog deals with movies in history.  There can be no doubt that movies portraying an historical event help frame that event in the popular imagination.  Indeed, no matter how inaccurate they may be, some movies define what people believe about an historical era or occurrence.

This is true enough for events that actually set out to be a portrayal, in some fashion, in history. So in movies like, for example, A Bridge Too Far, or Lawrence of Arabia, we can expect people to take their historical understandings from film. But such understanding aren't taken just from movies that are intentional portrayals of real historical events.  They're also taken from movies set in an era, but for which that era provides some sort of backdrop for some other purpose.

And war has been used as a backdrop for movies in which the war is a vehicle in more than one fashion.  Indeed, if we were to expand this out, there are adventure movies, comedies and even romances which use the big drama of war for other purposes.  Here, we look at just one category, that being the war adventure film, and we're doing that as movies of that type are so common. And they're particularly common in regard to World War Two.

So what do we mean by a War Adventure Movie. Well, it's a little difficult to define, but what we mean by that is a film which doesn't intent to accurately depict an historical event, but merely uses the historical event as a vehicle for the story telling.  Moreover, a film that, in doing that, doesn't attempt to tell us something about war itself.

As war is often a character in a war picture.  Saving Private Ryan may be fiction, and it may tell a compelling story, but it's set with a backdrop of real events that are significant to it and war is a character in the film.  Likewise, In Harms Way may be complete fiction in its characters, but it too uses war, no matter how badly, as more than a mere vehicle. The same could be said of Pearl Harbor.

These films are different. World War Two is in them, but they aren't really "about" World War Two. They're set in it, of course, but they're set in it to tell an adventure.

Put another way, war is to these movies what the Cold War is to the Eiger Sanction.

None of which keeps people from thinking they're picking up bits of history from them.  So let's take a look at them.

In doing that, we'd note that we're not presenting these in a definitively significant order. We sort of are, but sort of are not. So they're presented, sort of, in the order they're related to each other, and kind of in degree of quality.  But not strictly.

The Dirty Dozen

U.S. Army Rangers at Pointe-du-hoc, June 6, 1944.

The Dirty Dozen may be the best example of this genera in more than one way.  This 1967 film, a film adaptation from a well regarded novel, involves a disgruntled and disillusioned U.S. Army Major who has been assigned to train a group of Army prisoners for a commando raid on a French château used as a R&R center by German officers on D-Day.  The plot scenario involves obvious adventure, dramatic tension, and drama right from the onset, with conflicts between the prisoners and the whole world and the Major, played by Lee Marvin, a Marine Corps veteran of World War Two, in real life, and the Regular Army.  Moreover, the ensemble cast included a host of first rank actors from the time, including Ernest Borgnine (U.S. Navy veteran), Robert Ryan, George Kennedy (U.S. Army veteran), Charles Bronson (U.S. Army veteran), Jim Brown (famous NFL and collegic football player), John Cassavetes, Trini Lopez (folk singer) and Telly Savalas.  It was directed by Robert Aldrich who had a large collection of well regarded films to his name.

If you haven't seen  it, you should.

So how's it hold up as history.

Well, of course, Operation Overlord really did occur on June 6, 1944, and it did feature some commando actions.  The Germans did have some fairly large gatherings of officers in France, and in fact one, which was on the occasion of a large war game, was running on at least June 5/6.

But the Allies didn't try to intentionally take out any larger gatherings of German officers.  If they had been inclined to do that, they would have used specialized commandos.   All of these organizations were made up of highly trained formations that were made up of volunteers who had been trained for months in their military roles, and often for months for their roles in D-Day.  A put together pick up unit.  Not so much.  Indeed, not at all.

And, while the film is so popular that people occasionally attempt to maintain that it's based on something real, vaguely, it isn't.  It's just good fiction.  With thousands of men to choose from, the Army wasn't so desperate as to put a vital mission, even a suicide mission, in the hands of felons.

Lord Lovat with members of No. 4 Commando, an example of real (in this case British) commandos.

Okay, what about the material details, then?

Oddly, this movie starts off well in this category but then fades later on.  Early in the film Major Reisman is shown in uniforms that would be correct for the time, including field uniforms.  For example, he wears the M-41 field jacket, which was the common field jacket in June 1944.  And the prisoners wear the herringbone tweed cotton uniform that would have been correct for them. At some point, however, everyone switches to the M1943 field jacket and OD trousers. This might be understandable if this was because everyone involved is a paratrooper by implication, and this in fact might be why this was done.  While the M1943 field jacket had been designed for paratroopers and had already been adopted, however, on June 6 it wasn't yet being worn by the troops and paratroopers were wearing the M42 uniform.

Movies of the 60s often got these details wrong, of course, and frankly they often didn't bother with them at all, so that's understandable.  Less so, however, is the depiction of everyone carrying the M3 submachinegun.  The M3 wasn't even in the infantry, including paratroop infantry, TO&E, although a commando unit might be expected to carry some submachineguns. Certainly airborne units unofficially did.  They carried Thompsons however, for the most part, in June 1944, when they had them.

This film was made during an era in which the movies loved submachineguns and that probably serves to explain it, and the reason that every German is carrying a MP42.  Pretty unrealistic, however.

So there you have it.  Good drama, but pretty bad history.

One final thing regarding this film, while it wasn't great history, it was good movie making, and the movie was so well regarded by director Sam Peckingpah that he pretty much tried to hire its cast wholesale for The Wild Bunch.  Indeed, Ernest Borgnine, then a little slimmer, and Robert Ryan did made the trip over to Peckinpah's film.  He tried to hire Lee Marvin for the Bishop Pike role, but he wasn't available so William Holden was hired instead.  Somewhat ironically, Marvin had already played a similar role in 1966's The Professionals, a film which Ryan was also in.

The Dirty Dozen has a pile of sequels. None of them are worth watching.

Let's look at a British one.

The Guns of Navarone

 Well, a somewhat British one.

The Guns of Navarone was a huge hit when it was released in 1961, only fifteen years after the end of the war, and it featured a largely British and European cast with Gregory Peck, the American actor, for star appeal, and with Anthony Quinn in his universal role of exotic foreign person.  The book is a faithful rendition of Alistair Maclean's novel of the same name.

The plot of this film involves the assembly of something like a SOE squad to go in as commandos and take out coastal artillery guns that have been positioned on the island of Navarone. It's early in the war and a British garrison on a nearby island needs to be evacuated before the Germans land on the island. The guns are a threat to any Royal Navy evacuation.  Because they're emplaced in a man made cavern, they can't be bombed from the air, so commandos will have to do it.

Okay, historic accuracy?

Well, the British expedition to Greece, which we recently covered, did feature some major withdrawals from the region, and they were done in a way that later in the war they could not have been.  Later, aircraft would have decimated such efforts, but the Germans lacked sufficient air assets in the region to cause that to occur. And the British did occupy some major Mediterranean islands, Crete and Malta among them.

So the setting has some plausibility.

And the British were big on small-time raids by commandos, and indeed had already engaged in them in the general region.  And as the SOE in particular was an odd group that seemingly engaged in some assignments on a sort of pick up basis, well that too makes some sense.

So overall, the plausibility of the plot doesn't completely lack merit.

Of course, what does strain things is getting two massive coast guns into a man made tunnel without the British apparently knowing about it in time to prevent, or even on any sort of timely basis. That'a  real stretch.  It's one the Germans, moreover, would have been pretty unlikely to attempt.

So. . .

Well it is an adventure film. . . 

On material details ,this film isn't too bad, all in all, but it does fall into the submachinegun era of World War Two films and it further is a mostly British film. The British in this period paid little attention to accuracy in firearms details and so their own weapons show up a lot in the hands of enemy troops. This film has piles of submachineguns in it, which makes a little sense for the commandos as they are relatively compact, but the Germans carry an inordinate number as well. And sometimes the Germans, in this film, carry British Sten guns, which is just period movie sloppiness.

So, this film does better than we might suspect, and it is an adventure classic.  One thing to note is that for the big gun scenes production values have really changed, so its pretty hard to suspect present awareness for some of them.

I should note that I thought about putting this film first in this list, as its arguably the gold standard, in some ways, for these films.  It's not a better film than The Dirty Dozen, but its sort of the archtype of the war adventure film.

Force Ten From Navarone

Yugoslavians partisans.

Taking things somewhat out of order, as we've delt with The Guns of Navarone, we might as well take up Force 10 From Navarone next.

First, in doing this, let us note that the "from Navarone" part of this film actually makes little sense whatsoever, as the fictional Greek island has nothing to do with this movie.  Rather, the title was an obvious attempt to recall the other film, which Alistair MacClean's 1968 novel did as well, attempting to recall both his earlier book and the success of the 1961 film.  There is, however, a tie in, and we'll note it below

Made seventeen years later in 1978, the movie, the film's thesis is an SOE mission to Yugoslavia which reassembles some of the survivors of the mission to Navarone, including its commander, Mallory, the explosives expert, Miller, and oddly Squadron Leader Barnby, an extremely minor role played by Richard Harris in the first film.  The hook to the first film is that it contained hints that the mission had been betrayed right from the onset, and this one picks up with that.  The betrayer has been identified, and has gone from Navarone to Yugoslavia, where's he's a German agent embedded with the Yugoslavian Communist partisans.  Mallory's mission is to go in and get him.

From there the plot develops that the SOE just can't land a conventional mission to do this.  It has to have cover.  And the cover is that the men are fleeing justice with a stolen aircraft which they take to Yugoslavia.

Okay, the initial plot device is goofy and adds dramatic tension but nothing else in the film.  Barnby is recast as an American in this one, with Harrison Ford playing the part, apparently for his star power alone.  Carl Weathers is a hapless African American soldier who gets on the plane at the last moment actually believing that it's a party of men who have busted out of detention, as he has.  In Yugoslavia, we meet the Chetniks, the party is imprisoned (like it was in Guns of Navarone) by the Germans, and they link up with Yugoslavian partisans.

Okay, how does it rate, history wise.

Well, the British were very involved in the war in Yugoslavia through the SOE. The Yugoslavian partisans were heavily equipped by the Soviets, as this movie, filmed with the cooperation of the Yugoslavian army, shows.  There were pro German Chentnik parties.  The partisan war in Yugoslavia was fairly large scale.

So, like the Guns of Navarone, the historical background is there.

On material details, this film does much better than the Guns of Navarone.  British uniforms are correct.  Ameican uniforms are more or less correct, with some British additions. The German and Chetnik uniforms and equipment are correct, in no small part thanks to the Yugoslavian army, although old T-34 tanks stand in for German armor.

What doesn't really hold up, however, is the movie itself.  It just isn't all that good.  

Part of that is that it suffers from being an obvious sequel, and most sequels aren't all that good. Beyond that, the movie is surprisingly slow, and the plot is really strained.  Obvious efforts to throw in current stars, such as Harrison Ford, and also Barbara Bach for window dressing, fail.  Robert Shaw, in his last role (he died prior to the movie being released) gave an excellent performance, as did British character actor Edward Fox, but its not enough to make the film worth watching.

Which it isn't.

Where Eagles Dare

Crest of the German 6th SS Mountain Division Nord.

Having looked at two joint British American works based on novels by Alistair MacLean, let's look at a third, Where Eagles Dare.

Where Eagles Dare is a 1968 film based on MacLean's 1966 novel.  This gives us an interesting look at how entertainment of the era worked, in that this film was well received and is now regarded as a classic and, by some, one of the best films of all time.  It's interesting to note that in the context of the film being released in the annus horriblus 1968, right at the height of the Vietnam War.  Based on what we know and popularly recall of the times, we'd not expect this film to have come out in that year, let alone be a hit, but it did, and it was.

This film can probably be regarded as the pinnacle of MacLean's war adventure stories, which doesn't mean that it's the best of the genre.  Rather, this film is heavy on the action, while still rooted in the war.  The plot, which is extremely complicated, involves a British commando team, led by a British Major John Smith who is a Grenadier Guard.  It's a pick up team, not one that has preexisted.  It has one American member, which may have been the screenwriters way of assuring interest for an American audience (I haven't read the book), Lt. Shaffer.  Major Smith is played by British screen titan Richard Burton, who was at the height of his star power at the time and who was playing a character well outside his wheelhouse.  Schaffer was played by rising star Clint Eastwood.

The commando team must parachute into the Alps in order to rescue an American general who, we're told, knows the details of Operation Overlord, although as the story develops, that's not the real purpose of the mission.  This is so that they may make their way down into a neighboring town in order to secure access to a towering castle just outside it.  Further, they parachute in wearing the uniforms of SS Gebirgsjäger, mountain infantry, and we're informed that the castle is the headquarters for the "SS Mountain Corps".

Frankly, from this point on, the plot is just too complicated to detail, but the winter scenery is spectacular, and the action faced pace.  The screenplay manages to work in a really scary tramway twice, a castle, a spectacular Alpine flight of a Fokker Ju 52 transport, and Ingrid Pitt as window dressing in her seemingly only one serious role.

It is, quite frankly, a great adventure film.

How's it hold history wise?

Well . . .

Okay, lets start with what it gets right, where we can.  We know, of course, that Germany includes Alpine regions and of course the setting, Europe prior to Operation Overlord, takes place in an actual period of World War Two.  The Waffen SS did have mountain troops as the Waffen SS, as the war progressed, came to have mirror image formations of everything the regular German army did.

So far so good, right?

From there, things decline. For one thing, the distinction between the German army and the SS in this film is really vague.  We know that most of the regular soldiers are in the SS, as we've been told that early on. This doesn't seem necessary for the film, however, and the two senior officers seem to be in different services, one in the SS and the other in the army.  They're both aligned against a third character, SS Sturmbannführer Von Hapen who is in the regular, i.e., not the Waffen, SS, as we can tell from his all black uniform.  Why he's there isn't clear, and why the senior military figure from the Waffen SS would be at odds with another member of the SS isn't explained either.

All of those, perhaps, are minor details that can be excused in the name of adventure.

Well, how about material details?

The movie suffers from the everyone carrying a submachinegun thing so common to this era.  That makes more sense, however, than the introduction of a helicopter to the film.  The Germans did actually order and deploy a handful of helicopters during the war, so perhaps that can be excused, but they were ungainly things that wouldn't have carried a passenger to the top of a mountain castle.

A bigger problem, aviation wise, is that the Ju 52 didn't have the sort of range that would be necessary for the mission depicted. . . even one way.  There's no way a Ju 52 could fly from the UK to an Alpine region of Germany and back.

But, taking it all in, as noted, this film's purpose is adventure, not history.  So you have to excuse a lot of liberties taken with this one. Fortunately, the adventure aspect of the film, including some with really high suspense, are well done and so its pretty easy even for the history conscious to enjoy the film.

The Eagle Has Landed

Unit symbol of German 1st Parachute Division.

Going from one "eagle film" to another, we'll next take up the 1976 film The Eagle Has Landed, which was based on Jack Higgins' well done novel of the same name.

Given the name, a person might think that this film was a sequel to Where Eagles Dare, but in fact it has no connection with it other than that it involves people parachuting and German uniforms.  In this case, however, the subjects are actually German paratroopers.

Indeed, that fact makes this the most unusual of these films as its the only one in which hte protagonists are mostly German.  There are very few English language films featuring German soldiers or airmen as the central characters, let alone sympathetically, and for good reason.  So this film is a real exception to the rule.

The plot here involves a German colonel who is in the Abwehr, German intelligence.  Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who remains enigmatic to this day, comes back from a meeting with Hitler in which he informs Col. Radl, the subordinate, that Hitler has ordered a feasibility study be done on kidnapping Winston Churchill.  Canaris considers the concept insane, but he orders that it be done, but be done with bare minimum effort, as he also knows that SS leader Heinrich Himmler will follow up on it.

Radl, played by Robert Duvall, sets about his work and soon learns, as he's doing it, that an odd set of highly temporary coincidences actually might make the plan feasible.  He submits his report in that fashion, which in fact gets it the attention of Canaris in a negative fashion.  It's soon revealed, however, that his office is bugged or contains a plant, as Himmler knows of the plan nearly immediately, calls Radl to Berlin, and orders the plan carried out, supposedly under Hitler's orders.

The plan itself involves parachuting a group of German paratroopers into England near a coastal town which is a Catholic remnant village.  Some days prior a member of the Irish Republican Army must make his way to the same town in order to arrange for things.  His contact is a woman living in the town, seemingly part of it, but in actuality a long displaced Boer whose family suffered due to the results of the Boer War.  Churchill is set to visit the town.

The paratroopers themselves are serving in a penal unit assigned to the extremely small German vessels that launched single torpedoes. Such vessels, often mistakenly regarded as human torpedoes, did in fact exist in 1943, the year the movie was set in, and the Germans in fact used them.  The unit operates from one of the Channel Islands, and the Germans did in fact occupy some of the channel islands.  The unit has been assigned this duty as their commander, Col. Kurt Steiner, attempted to rescue a Jewish girl at a railroad station, which led to a confrontation with the SS.

The men, in the reverse of Where Eagles Dare, parachute in wearing British uniforms but marked with Polish insignia, posing as Polish paratroopers serving in the UK.

Pretty complicated plot.  And it gets more so.  It turns out that a unit of American Rangers is stationed nearby.

Well, how does it hold up, history wise?

In 1943 there were Polish forces in the UK that were serving with the Allies.  About this time, the first Rangers of the U.S. Army did start training in the UK.  Unlike Where Eagles Dare, the airborne mission using a captured C-47 would have been an easy flight.  The Irish Republican Army actually did cooperate with the Abwehr until 1944, when it terminated its cooperation as it became obvious that the Allies were going to win the war.

So far, so good?

Well, there are certainly some holes as well.  For one thing, the village being Catholic, which isn't really necessary to either the movie's plot or the books, would be extremely unlikely. There were large numbers of Catholics in the UK by 1943, but they still remained a distinct minority, and there were next to no villages that had managed to retain being wholly Catholic since the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.  Individual Catholics and Catholic families certainly persevered the entire time, but entire villages, with a few notable exceptions, not so much.  Perhaps that's why that is a bigger element of the book as compared to the movie.

Churchill, it might be noted, didn't have a body double, which is an essential element of the plot, but it's also an excusable one.

More inexcusable, German paratroopers really can't be denazified.  They were part of the Luftwaffe, of course, and while there were members of the German army who transferred into them, they were also recruited out of Goering's police forces as well, so they had more than a few real Nazis early on.  Perhaps their officers might have been more or less equivalent in views to officers of the German army, but that wasn't exactly a benign view by and large and the "good German army" myth is just that, a post-war myth boosted by former German officers to excuse their conduct.  German paratroopers, moreover, were complicit in atrocities in Crete, so long-serving ones, as these were supposed to have been, were unlikely to have fought a morally unobjectionable war.

The portrayal of American Rangers as more or less regular infantry, and incompetently led, is very far off the mark.  Rangers were commandos from the onset and always extremely skilled.

Indeed, it's on that point where the movie really breaks down.  Most of the departures from one thing or another can be excused or ignored up to this point, although the good German soldier thing is hard to accept, but Rangers as green incompetents is way off the mark. And here we can start our discussion of material details as well.

The Rangers in this film are almost all equipped with M2 Carbines.  This is another film that's in the submachinegun era, and the M2, which is rarely seen in film at all, is almost a submchaine gun.  It wasn't really a World War Two weapon, however, having been introduced at the very tail end of the war.  Indeed, it was introduced so late that whether it saw any action at all during the war is debated as a point of military minutia.  In 1943 Rangers would have mostly carried M1 Garands, although it is known that some were training with M1917 Enfields.

They also wouldn't have had an armored car, which was almost exclusively a cavalry vehicle in the American army.

On the paratroopers, we have less to complain about in terms of material details. As noted, they're all equipped with submachineguns, but that's the standard for this movie era, and it makes more sense, if not complete sense, in the case of paratroopers.  Most British and British equipped paratroopers would hvae carried rifles.

So am I giving this one a thumbs down?  No, not really.  It's entertaining and good enough to be watched.  It's quite good early on and doesn't really start to suffer until the Rangers enter the picture, by which time most of the film has been watched.  It's worth viewing.

Kelly's Heroes

Kelly's Heroes is an unusual film here, as it's the only one I've reviewed before.  I dealt with in our entry on the War Movies of 1970.  What I stated about it is here:

In contrast to the material inaccuracy of Patton is the accuracy of the peculiar and appealing World War Two sort of drama/comedy, Kelly's Heroes, was released on June 23, 1970.  Filmed in Yugoslavia, the producers were able to make use of American M4 Sherman's and other World War Two vintage hardware that remained there.  Not stopping at that, however, three Soviet tanks were carefully converted to be nearly dead ringers for German Tiger Is.  In terms of ground equipment (but not air) the film is the first materially accurate World War Two film made.  The depiction of the fluid nature of France in 1944 is fairly accurate, and the combat scenes are well done.

It isn't accurate, of course, in terms of the portrayal of soldiers, and it wasn't met to be.  Donald Sutherland's portrayal of "Oddball", a hippie tank commander, steals the show, but he portrays a figure simply impossible for the time.  The film's main star is supposed to be Kelly, portrayed by Clint Eastwood, but its really Sutherland who shines.  The film portrays an armored reconnaissance unit that goes rogue on a mission to loot a bank behind German lines under the leadership of former, and now demoted, officer Kelly.  The cast in the film is really impressive.

Released in 1970, the film anticipates the changing mood of the time, but it remains today a cult classic and its popular with careful students of World War Two for the reasons noted.  It's odd to realize that Sutherland's portrait of Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H was actually from earlier the same year, as his portrayal here was a risky choice.  It's also odd to realize that Carroll O'Connor's portrayal of an Army general in this film was not intended to be a parody of Patton, even though it seems to be.

Kelly's Heroes is the exception in this list for a lot of reasons, a significant one being is that it's sort of freakishly accurate in material details for a movie of its era, as noted above.  In this area, the film really stands apart from almost every war film of this era.

This movie involves a plot in which a wrongly demoted former officer, Kelly, learns from a POW of a German cache of gold in a French village.  While never really explained, it's pretty clear that he's part of an anti tank section and its equipment is correctly portrayed for this period, including a half-track mounted anti tank gun.  Having learned of this information while interrogating the officer POW, he forms a plan to sneak through the lines and hit the bank in the village before the advancing allies get there.  He enlists first the aid of his section, then picks up a small group of M4 Sherman tanks led by the aforementioned Oddball, and the plot grows from there.  Ultimately, the result is a true advance in the lines, while a spastic General, played by Carroll O'Connor, tries to catch up with the men of his command who are seemingly engaging in an independent advance.

This is, as noted, an adventure movie, so we wouldn't really expect many of the details, both historical and material, to be accurately portrayed. But they actually are.

On history and the movie, this film is set in the rapid advance stage of the war in France and rapid advancement is depicted in this film nearly as well as it is in the movie Patton, save for the fact that the material details of this film are much better.  Combat scenes are fairly realistic, including scenes with armor.  

In material details, this movie really shines, which has made it sort of an obsessed over classic in the military history community.  Almost every item depicted in the film is depicted correctly.  American vehicles, including armor, are correct.  German armor appears correct, the moviemakers having retrofitted Yugoslavian T-34s to appear like German Tiger tanks.  The small arms depicted in the film are largely correct. Submachineguns appear again, but not to the exclusion of other arms, and submachineguns would actually be correct for the type of unit that's portrayed.  This film shows the correct use of the M1919 machinegun as well as a Browning Automatic Rifle.  Uniforms are also largely correct.

Indeed, things are so accurate that it's the small inaccuracies, some intentionally inserted in the film, that stand out.  The Oddball character wears an A2 flight jacket, which a tanker would not, but then a tanker wouldn't have had a beard or fairly long hair either.  Given his role in the film, however, the departure makes sense.

The BAR depicted in one scene is an FN made variant with a pistol grip. That's incorrect for the U.S. Army, but you have to be paying very close attention to notice it.  Kelly wears black postwar combat boots, which are not correct for the period depicted, but that's difficult to notice in a film in which the uniforms are otherwise very correct.

About the only real noticeable oddity is that one of the soldiers carries a Mosin Nagant sniper rifle, which makes no sense at all.  The movie makers seemingly wanted this individual to carry a captured rifle and may simply not have had access to a German rifle, but its very difficult to rationalize if you know what it is.

Otherwise, the film is surprisingly accurate in every detail, something we wouldn't expect from a film of this type.  As note, that's why this film is well liked by the World War Two history community, and its well worth watching.

Inglourious Basterds

Every movie in this list, up until the last one, has been either a British production, or a British American one.  And up until this one, the most recent of them was made in 1976.  Inglourious Basterds was made in 2009, some thirty years later. Both of those facts may be worth noting.

This film is awful.

As in, really bad.

Because this is a Quentin Tarantino movie, it has a following. That is, as far as I can tell, the only reason that anyone has ever watched it.  

This film is basically Tarantino coming to the World War Two adventure film in the same manner that he came to the Western.  A Tarantino film, at least after Pulp Fiction, tends to be a caricature of itself, and this film is no exception.  It has the Tarantino hallmarks of extreme violence and weirdness, which is what Tarantino has become known for.

The basic plot of this movie is that a group of American commandos, made up of Jewish soldiers, is assigned, after a lot of pre event weirdness, to assassinate Hitler at a movie theater in Paris.  The details leading up to this are weird and strained and not worth going into. Think apartment shoot 'em up in Pulp Fiction.  Hitler is killed, giving us a different ending to the war.

History?  Well the Nazis were really bad.  Commando unit of all Jewish soldiers?  Well the British, who really were the champs on commando units and special operatives, did have a group of Jewish special operatives. So there's something, albeit very little, to the plot.

On material details, by 2009 there's really little excuse for major material detail errors, and this one, given the oddity of the plot, doesn't really have any.

It's just a really bad movie.

Don't bother.

Some final thoughts.

World War Two was almost the dawn of the special troop unit, so perhaps it's not too surprising that it gave us the military adventure movie. There are some pre-WWII examples of very special units, but they're relatively rare.  Quite a few of them are subjects of movies, it might be noted.

But commandos are really a British invention, and the war was uniquely suited to them.  By the wars end the British had at least four special operation groups of a military or quasi military nature, all of which conducted special missions. The US followed suit with the Rangers and the Marine Corps Raiders.

The Second World War was a huge war, and that meant, by extension, that it gave rise and license to any number of wild military projects, sometimes by wild men.  Naturally, that reflected itself in film, and probably naturally, it reflected itself first in British literature and film first. The British originated the special group, during the period during which they were on the desperate defensive, making a virtue out of necessity.

Oddly, perhaps because of their British origin, none of these films involves the war in the Pacific.

Such units carried on after the war, of course, and therefore, perhaps also not surprisingly, the military adventure movie and book also finds expression in wars after World War Two, but nowhere to the same extent.  And notably, the heyday of these movies, in so far as the Second World War is concerned, lingered into the 70s, but it was really wrapping up by 1970s.  We really  only have three post 1970 examples, and they're all a little problematic.  Only one, The Eagle Has Landed, is worth watching.  And very notably, the last one, filmed in 2009, is total junk. 

This genre may have ended.  Or not.  Any time a film genre is declared over, something comes along.  But nothing has come along worth watching in over forty years now.

Which leaves you with the better examples of these films, which in fact remain nearly as good as they ever were.