I remember it.

The event referred to here, that is:

Lex Anteinternet: April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia: Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the ...

On May 1, 1970, US troops entered Cambodia in Operation Rock Crusher.  The operation sent the 1st Cavalry Division, which was famously air mobile in Vietnam, i.e., "air cavalry", the 11th Armored Cavalry REgiment, the ARVN 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment and the ARVN 3d Airborne Brigade into Cambodia following a massive B-52 air strike.

Engineers of the 11th ACR sweeping for mines ahead of a M551 Sheridan.

And that's what I remember.

It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade.  Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection.  I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older.  Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.

In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to.  I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory.  Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.

Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old.  So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970.  In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.

We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.

Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth.  My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.

That's interesting in a way as over time there's come to be a genera of literature that reflects childhood memories of war, and mostly of World War Two.  And when I say that, I mean American memories.  Europeans and Asians who were 6 or 7 definately have memories of World War Two as there wasn't a square inch of Europe that wasn't impacted by the war.  Even lands where a German jackboot never set foot, or where Japanese infantry never trod, were heavily impacted directly by the war.  The British were bombed and sent their children, if they could, to the countryside.  Swedes lived on short rations, pinned into between the Germans in occupying Norway and the war raging on the Finnish/Soviet border.  Swiss rations in the neutral nation became so short that serious worries over starvation set in and commons gardening became common.  And of course if you were in an area where ground forces contested for ground or even occupied it the events were unforgettable.

But in the United States none of that occured and so the memories are of other things.  But they are there.  Films like Radio Days and the like by some really well known actors depict the era and what it was like to be in the various stages of being young.  Even Gene Shepherd's A Christmas Story touches on it a bit, with Shepherd setting his Yuletide recollections forward in time, as he was actually that age several years prior himself, during the Depression. Shepherd served in World War Two.

Of course, Shepherd's A Christmas Story might in fact be the most accurate depiction for a young person, the way they perceive remote events.  Set in 1940, the kids worry about Christmas gifts and school yard bullies, not the Germans having just invaded France.  Likewise, in 1968, 69 and 70, when I was first in school, we didn't worry about the Republic of Vietnam.  We didn't even discuss it in school.

When I entered grade school, and through the early years of it, the day had a pretty set routine.

My father left for work really early, often before I was up.  Back then he got up around 5:00, which seemed really early, but now I get up no later that, and often a lot earlier than that, myself.  In my very early grade school years my mother sometimes made me breakfast but a lot of times I just ate cereal and drank milk.  I still eat cereal for breakfast quite a bit, but I never drink milk anymore and really haven't since my grade school years.

We had a Zenith television at home.  It was in the kitchen, which is also where we always ate.  It'd been placed in a spot that was just below a window by the stove, kind of an awkward place to put it, and I know that it had been relocated from the living room to there. That was likely because my father often worked in the evenings using the kitchen table for a work table.  Indeed, that some table was used for absolutely everything.

Television was new to my parents at the time and the TV, looking back, I now realize had only made its appearance a couple of years prior.  Up until then they didn't have one so this television was their first TV.  As first generation television owners their habits didn't really match later generations in regard to it, although in my father's case it came to somewhat resemble the modern a bit at one time, before ceasing to once again.  Anyhow, neither of my parents turned the television on in the morning.

But I did, and my mother let me do that.

At that time there was no such thing as cable television, at least in our town, and so broadcast TV was it.  Very early on there was only one channel, but because of my specific memory recollected here, I know that we had at least two, and maybe three, channels.  One of the channels, even though it was local, rebroadcast material from Denver's KOA television and other channels.  In the morning that one played kids shows.  One was the legendary Captain Kangaroo, which I would watch before going to school, and the other was a local Denver product which featured a young female host and a sock puppet character of some sort.  That one took submissions form the viewing audience and I once had a drawing I sent in shown in that part of the show.

School started at 8:00 and some time prior to that I went out the door, rain, shine or snow, and walked to school. The hike was about a mile, which isn't far.  Nobody ever drove me or my associates to school. . . ever.  Indeed, while my mother could drive and my father had purchased what I now know was a 1963 Mercury Meteor for her to have something to drive, but she was an awful driver and it was undoubtedly best she didn't drive me to school, but then nobody's parents did. The few kids who were hauled to school by motor vehicle were hauled by school bus, if they lived in the boundaries.  At the end of the school day, which I think was around 3:30, we walked back home.

If we had homework to do we did it then, and I know that homework actually did start to become a feature of our routine in 2nd Grade.  Our parents were expected to help us with penmanship, which my mother did.  Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting.  I never have.  They also helped us with math, which at that time my mother did as well. Both of my parents were really good with math, which I also have never been.  I recall at the time that we all had to struggle with "New Math", which was as short lived ill fated experiment at teaching something that is both natural and in academics dating back to antiquity in a new way.  It was a bad experiment and its taken people like me, upon whom it was afflicted, decades to recover from it.  It also meant that both of my parents, my mother first and my father later, were subject to endless frustration as they tried to teach me math effectively, having learned real math rather than new math.

If I didn't have home work or if I had finished it, I was allowed to turn on the television once again.  Gilligan's Island, the moronic 1960s sit com, was already in syndication and one of the local channels picked it up in a rebroadcast from Denver and played it at 4:30. At 5:00 the same channel played McHale's Navy.

My father normally left work around 5:00 p.m. and was home very shortly thereafter.  At this point in time he had to travel further across town so that usually meant that he was home no earlier than 5:15 but on some occasions it was later, around 5:30.  Usually he got home prior to 5:30 however, and when he did, he switched the channel to the news over my protests.

The network nightly news came on at 5:00 and ran to 5:30. At 5:30 the local news was shown on one of the local channels.  My father watched both and the custom became to leave the television on during dinner, something that I haven't liked as an adult.  From around this time until his later years he kept the television on until he want to bed, often simply as something on in the background as he worked.  Interestingly, he'd counsel me not to attempt to do homework in front of the television as he regarded it as impossible. I didn't at the time, but he was quite correct.

I don't recall what he watched on TV as a rule.  My mother never picked up the evening television habit and just didn't watch it.  Indeed, her intentional television watching was limited to a very few number of shows including Days Of Our Lives during one hour of the daily afternoon, and things such as The Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk.    Having said that, just looking through the shows that were on in 1970, it seems to me back then they both watched some series that were brand new to television at the time.  The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one they both liked and it debuted in 1970. The Odd Couple was as well..  The Flip Wilson Show they also liked and was new. The short run Tim Conway Show they also liked.  Some others that were still on that they never watched were shows like Hogan's Hero's, which was nearing  the end of its run.

One thing that networks did at that time, as well as local channels, was to run movies.  When they did, it tended to be a big deal.  I can recall Lawrence of Arabia running when I was in my early grade school years, being broadcast over two nights.  My mother, who admired T. E. Lawrence, watched both nights, which was unusual.  I also recall The Longest Day running, again over two nights, when I was in 1st Grade.

So what's that have to do with Cambodia?

11th ACR in Cambodia.

Well, a lot in terms of my recollection of this day.

We grade school boys were familiar with war, as in "the war", and that war was World War Two.  Some of us had fathers who had been in World War Two, although they were older fathers, keeping in mind that in that era people had larger families and children stretched out over their parent's lifespans often differently than they do now.  It wasn't unusual for a grade school kid to have a father who had been in World War Two, and indeed my closest friend's father had been in the ETO during the war.  The dominance of World War Two in the culture, however, may be shown by the fact that I had a father who had been in the Korean War and I still thought of World War Two as "the war" and my father more or less did as well, which is odd to realize in that it wasn't just him, but others of his age and equivalent experience who took that view.  Indeed, it seems to me that it wasn't until right about this time, 1970, that the started to talk about their own war at all, and indeed also about this time it began to creep into the culture as background elements in popular stories.

Adding to this was the impact of popular culture.  As noted, the movie The Longest Day was such a big deal that it sticks out in my mind as something shown on television around 1969, probably in a network premier.  The movie Patton, one of the most celebrated American military movies of all time, was released in April 1970, and indeed its sometimes noted that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger watched a private screening of it just shortly before U.S. armor went into Cambodia, although the suggestion that this influenced Nixon seems specious to me, the invasion having been something that events were working up to since the mid 60s and which had been ongoing for weeks prior to the US putting its forces in.  In other media, kids who liked cartoon books, which I never have, circulated such works as Sergeant Rock or GI Combat, both of which were set in World War Two.

So, for a 6 and 7 year old boy, we knew about wars, in the childish youthful glorification of war sense that has been a common feature of the play of boys since the dawn of man, but the war we knew about was a movie and cartoonish version of World War Two.

On May 1, 1970 I watched Gilligan's Island.  Following that McHale's Navy came on and I started watching that.  My father got home almost immediately after McHale's Navy started and switched the channel to the news, over my protest.  To my shock, the news featured M113 Armored Personnel Carriers crossing a river.  

I was stunned and asked my father "what's that?".  It looked like something out of The Longest Day.  I can't recall his exact words but he told me that the scene depicted US troops in action in Cambodia.

The fact that it had an impact is best demonstrated that fifty years later, I still recall it.  It was unsettling.  Even at 6 it was obvious that the school yard games we played in which the Allies and the Axis duked it out in Europe and Asia 30 years prior were being overshadowed by a real war in our own era.  People were fighting and it wasn't a game.

It was a type of epiphany, to be sure.  But a person needs to be careful about claiming too much.  It isn't as if at nearly age 7 I suddenly became keenly aware of everything going on in Indochina.  But suddenly I was much more aware of something that had actually been playing in the background my entire life.  Indeed, as it was in the background, but subtle, and often limited at that age to a short snipped on the nightly news that was often devoid of any real engaging footage, it was just something, up until then, that was.

Of course, while 7 years old isn't old, even at 7 your early early childhood years are waning.  The next five years in Vietnam, only three of which had a large scale American presence, were ones that were hard not to be aware of.  The unrelated but still huge news event of Watergate was impossible not to be aware of.  And by the time the Republic of Vietnam started collapsing in 1975, I was old enough to be very much aware of it.

But that awareness started on this day in 1970.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Related thread:

Growing up in the 1960s

Blog Mirror: The Cold War History Blog: Cold War Movie Review: The Third Man

Cold War Movie Review: The Third Man

Technological Acclimation and Mystic Pizza

Sometimes you don't realize how acclimated you've become to technology until you experience it in an odd fashion.

The other night I was flipping  though the channels and hit upon the movie Mystic Pizza.  I've seen it before. It's really not worth watching and I knew that when I hit on it.

For those who haven't seen it, don't bother.  A synopsis of the plot, or rather plots, is as follows, as it plays into what I've noted here as the theme of this entry.  The movie follows the lives and loves of three young Portuguese American women, who all  work at a pizza restaurant in the Connecticut seaport town of Mystic.  They characters are Kat Araujo, played by Annabeth Gish (no relationship to the great silent screen star Lillian Gish), Daisy Araujo, played by the then up and coming Julia Roberts and Jojo Barbosa, played by the Lili Taylor.

Note that none of the actresses are Portuguese Americans.*

Anyhow, the basic gist of the film is that Kat and Daisy are sisters, and Kat is bound in the near future for Yale, while Daisy is wild and not bound for Yale.  Jojo is tied up in romance with a Portuguese American fisherman and the film starts off with their wedding, which is interrupted for most of the film when she collapses during the ceremony, burdened with the thought of the seriousness of the obligation she's embarking upon.

None of which has all that much to do with what I'm noting, but two parts of the plot do, and they both involve telephones.

Daisy has met a "preppy" (this 1988 film was made during the preppy era) who is a failed law student. His booting out from law school hasn't interrupted his wealth somehow, to we have the Townie/Preppy romance thing going on, a theme that dates back in various ways to the silent film era.  Kat is not only working at Mystic Pizza, but is also baby sitting the daughter of a young architect whose wife is off in England.  Yeah, you can probably see how all these plots develop from there.

Anyhow, in once scene the Daisy character is supposed to go to dinner with Preppy dude and meet his parents, but Kat, who is supposed to fill in for her at the pizza joint, doesn't show up.  Daisy tries to call her but the handset has been kicked off the phone at the Architect's house where Architect, daughter and Kat are watching television.

That struck me there simply because now you'd call on your cell.  If nobody answered you'd text.

It didn't disrupt me watching the film, and indeed I didn't have much invested in it anyhow, but that just struck me.

More significantly, however, late in the movie Architect and Kat arrange to go to a giant 18th Century house he is working on Halloween night as the house is reputedly haunted.  Note, I didn't say this movie was good.  While there, the predictable happens.  Jojo, meanwhile, has agreed to participate in this evil by watching daughter, whereupon she discovers her love for children in a weakly developed part of the film which in turn will lead to the resumption of her nuptials.  Anyhow, just like a silent film, Wife returns from England and Jojo is forced into making up a strained lie as to the missing husband and babysitter.

At that point, automatically, a modern viewer will think, as this takes place in world not all that long ago and otherwise pretty much like ours, "why doesn't she call Kat on her cell phone or text?".  It's literally impossible not to.  Of course, she can't.  They didn't exist.

That's actually my sole point in noting this movie watching experience.  I'm now so used to cell phones that my first reaction is "why doesn't she use her cell phone?", and the thought keeps repeating as you are watching these scenes.

Okay, while on this, why did I watch this, again?

I don't really know.  I know that the first time I watched this movie on television it was a few years after its release as a fellow who was in law school at the same time I was, and who was from a somewhat well heeled family in Connecticut, took enormous offense to the movie at the time it was released.  I recall him asking me if I'd seen it one day at law school.  I didn't watch very many movies while in law school (maybe none) and I'd never heard of it.  I recall his view was that the movie maker, whom he knew, knew nothing about Portuguese Americans in Connecticut.  At the time, and upon the first viewing, I was pretty surprised that he'd be so wrapped up in that as he certainly wasn't a Connecticut Portuguese American either.

None of that justifies watching this film again, but there was nothing on and I was on the verge of falling asleep so I just left it on.  Having seen it now, I think I agree with the critic noted.  Everything, including the Portuguese nature of the protagonist, is pretty underdeveloped.  You only know that they're Portuguese as somebody says something about it now and then and their being Catholic is mentioned a couple of times and oddly inserted a couple of times.

FWIW, there really is a Mystic Pizza.  Most of the people who have seen this film apparently like it, as opposed to me, who does not, and following the film, the real Mystic Pizza was redone to look like the one in the move, which provides an odd example of art following life following art, I guess.

1917

I happened to catch this movie on opening day.  Off hand, I can't recall having ever seen a movie on opening day.

This film, opened on limited release just a few weeks ago and already subject to wide acclaim, is an English film that's expected to have a wide theater run in the U.S., making it one of a series of war pictures produced in the UK recently that have done well or are expected to do well in the U.S.  This would suggest that the widely held belief that Americans won't watch movies that aren't about themselves, or at least war pictures that aren't about Americans, is obsolete.  The recent films Dunkirk, The Darkest Hour and the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old have all done well in US releases.

This film, as its name indicates, takes place in 1917.  More specifically, the film takes place in April 1917, at which time the British were engaging in an offensive, and it is focused on two British soldiers who are dispatch runners.  In the movie's opening scenes the two young Lance Corporals (a single stripe in the English Army) are assigned the task of running an order from a General to a Major whose unit that is advancing rapidly in order to order that Major to halt his men before they are committed to an assault which areal reconnaissance has revealed will be a trap.

Running just under two hours long, this scenario sets up a tense journey for the men that I'll forgo detailing, as it would involve discussing elements of the plot that would constitute spoilers. And that's not really the purpose of our reviews here in any event. We will note that the film develops its plot very well, including doing an excellent job of character development in a fairly short period of time.

Indeed, we'll go so far as to say that this is the best World War One movie since Paths Of Glory, the epic 1957 film focusing on a real event in the French Army.  The two films are directly comparable other than that the trench scenes in both and the trench fighting scenes are remarkably well done.

If this film, this is aided by the technique of using one long shot, something rarely attempted in film but something that makes this movie uniquely personal.  As the film is a two hour long, single shot, the viewer is uniquely participating with the characters and never departs from the singular focus of the major protagonist, which is of course how people actual experience any significant events themselves.

The film is unique for a World War One film in that its not sympathetic with the Germans at all, which has tended to be the post 1950 view of the Great War.  Because it is a long shot, and because the film is focused directly on the protagonist, there wouldn't be an opportunity to do otherwise, but the film makes no attempt to do so.  Because of this, the movie has received some criticism from those who want to suggest its unduly patriotic or that it approaches the Great War too unilaterally.  That criticism fails to take into account the cinematography but frankly it also fails to take into account that the Germans in World War One were already exhibiting some of the conduct that they're uniformly criticized for in the Second World War and that such comments given World War One Germany a lot more credit than it deserves.

Concerning material details, this film is remarkably excellent.  Details of British uniforms are exact.  Trenches are, I'm informed, correctly done.  It's an amazing effort.  Particularly notable is the correct depiction of the use and nature of the British SMLE rifle of the time.  Also notable, however, may  be the correct depiction of the really slow nature of period aircraft, which is rarely accurately depicted.  A bit of a shock, from an American prospective, is the depiction of an army of the period which incorporated English blacks, as during this period the American military was strictly segregated.

We can criticize a few details and so we'll do so here.  On a large scale tactical level, during this period there would have been an effort to inform an advance element of a change of orders by air.  That isn't shown here, but it probably should have been addressed.  For those familiar with battlefield movements of the Great War of this period that sticks out.  It could have been explained easily enough as such efforts were frequently ineffective.

On another matter, in at least one scene one of the messenger soldiers turns into a sniper to engage him and in another the soldiers clear a farmstead.  Those familiar with actual message running will find this to be surprising as the delivery of the message is always paramount and messengers avoid engagement if at all possible.  In both instances the encounters seem unnecessary to the mission (a similar thing is done in Saving Private Ryan), although in the instance of the sniper it can be explained if the path is the only immediate one available.  If that's assumed, the soldiers action in engagement and the method of engagement is correct.

All in all, this is an excellent movie.

Paths of Glory

I just reviewed 1917 here the other day, although that review won't appear here until tomorrow, and the viewing of which caused me to recall the trench scenes of this film, Paths of Glory.

Paths of Glory is a black and white film directed by Stanley Kubrik and featuring Kirk Douglas as a French lawyer serving as an officer during the Great War.  The movie is a fictionalized account of an actual event in which French soldiers were tried for cowardice for their actions during a 1916 advance.  More than half the movie concerns their fate in French legal proceedings so the film is both a legal drama as well as a war picture.

Considered an anti war drama in typical reviews, the film contains one of the best filmed depictions of trench warfare ever made, surpassed only recently by the depictions in the English movie 1917.  The film was regarded as so critical in this regards that the French managed to put pressure on United Artists not to release the film in France for nearly twenty years.  Release in Germany and Switzerland was delayed so as to not offend the French, and the film was not released in Spain until 1986.  U.S. military establishments would not show the film.

In modern terms the film is mild as an anti war film compared to films on the Vietnam War.  And the degree to which any antiwar film is successful in conveying that message is always debatable.  At any rate, as a drama and a depiction of World War One trench warfare, the film does well.

In terms of material details, the film is a good one, accurately portraying uniforms and equipment of the French Army of the Great War.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This is a hard to describe recent Netflix film by the Coen brothers which lives up to their eclectic reputation.

A series of vignettes, the movie is the cinematic equivalent of a collection of short stories and is presented in that fashion.  Each vignette, set in the American West, is presented through a filmed page in a book, shown in the style of books in regards to illustrations and printing that predominated for the first half of the 20th Century.

The opening story is the one that contributes its name to the movie.  It's a send up of the old singing cowboy movies but with a plot turned on its head. Buster Scruggs, the singing cowboy, is also a cheerful misanthrope who is essentially a cartoon in character.  Amusing but overdone, the first scene is accordingly not one of the better ones in the film.

The second one, entitled Near Algodones, is much better, featuring James Franco as a would be bad man who cheats death repeatedly.  The opening of this story is improbable, but its a comedic role which somewhat serves to point out in more than one way the absurdity of spaghetti westerns.  It's well done and serves to start to revive what the first scene somewhat lost.

The third act is the extremely dark Meal Ticket.  It's frankly disturbing in content and would have been better left out of the film as it doesn't contribute to it and is very odd and disconcerting.

The fourth, All Gold Canyon, starts off as a charming study of an elderly prospector before taking no less than two Saki like plot twists that are very well done.

After that comes the best episode of the film, The Gal Who Got Rattled, which in spite of its dark and morally objectionable conclusion probably better depicts characters on the actual Oregon Trail better than any other movie or television show ever made, including its depiction of a frontier 19th Century marriage proposal.  Again, its depiction of suicide is morally objectionable, but the rest of the episode is a surprisingly accurate look at the characters of the time and in context.

The final scene, The Mortal Remains, is a purely allegorical depiction of a trip over the River Styx which I suspect a lot of viewers won't quite get.  For those who do, however it's well done.

The reputation of the Coen brothers is well established by now and this film fits right in with their prior works.  It is, as noted, difficult to review in the fashion of the films normally reviewed here as it it doesn't intend to be an accurate historical movie.  Nonetheless, in one scene it manages to go further than other movies depicting the same events and in terms of comedic effect, Near Algodones is well done in the Coen brothers style.

The Natural

I made a reference to this film the other day and was surprised to see that I'd never added it to our Movies In History list.  As its a great period movie, I'm correcting the omission.

Nearly anyone who reads this will have seen this movie already.  Released in 1984, the film was based on a 1952 novel by the same name, meaning that the book had taken a surprisingly long thirty years to reach the screen.  The plot surrounds a single baseball season in 1939, but the very early part of the story set in 1923 is critical to the story.  We learn, early on, that in 1923 the then 19 year old protagonist, Roy Hobbs (played by former university baseball player Robert Redford) has a chance to enter the major leagues as an absolute stand out baseball player.  On his way to his tryout as a pitcher he strikes out a Babe Ruth like figure as a demonstration, and then has his tryout disrupted by the intervention of a literal femme fatale (played by Barbara Hershey). The story picks up again in 1939 at which time Hobbs is 35 years old and has lost contact with those back home.

Much of the film is allegorical involving the struggle between good and evil, with evil personified in the form of dramatically beautiful women played by the aforementioned Barbara Hershey and a young Kim Basinger, and good likewise personified partially in female form in the character of Hobb's teenage girlfriend (Glen Close).  The remainder of the roles are all male as they make their way through the season and through a battle of good and evil metaphorically.

This is a great film and its likely the best baseball movie ever made.  It's a great American movie.

Regarding material details, having viewed it again just the other day, I was struck how accurate the details are.  Period baseball uniforms are exact, but more amazingly crowed details are incredibly well done.  The crowd looks more accurate and more in place for a 1930s vintage crowd that crowds in sports movies made in the 1930s do.  It's simply amazing.

As this is a very studied film, like all films, there are some errors in material details. But they are very minor.  Once scoreboard depicted in actual stadium, for example, is noted not to have been present in 1939.  The Star Spangled Banner is sung before an opening ball was thrown, which wasn't actually done before every game until World War Two (it was done during World War One and then discontinued and reinitiated during World War Two). But these are minor errors. All in all, the film is amazingly well done.

Maybe its about farming. . .

It's odd how you can pick up new things from a great movie no matter how many times you have seen it.  Indeed, perhaps you are more likely to pick up subtle things if you've seen a movie more than once, and some time has passed since you last saw it.

Anyhow, in the great Robert Redford film The Natural, the first reference to farming is vague, in the for of a youthful Roy Hobbs leaving the farming Midwest to try out in baseball.  We are soon years later when he appears at a dugout as a middle aged rookie for a team coached by Pop Fisher, who is lamenting not having become a farmer.

Towards the climax, an injured but seemingly recovered Hobbs reappears when Fisher is again delivering a version of the same speech about lamenting not having become a farmer.  Hobbs relates that "there's nothing like a farm" and discusses farming romantically.  Fisher relates that "my mother wanted always wanted me to be a farmer" to which Hobbs relates "my father wanted me to be a baseball player".

In the end, Hobbs is back on the farm, having returned to it, and his first love.

Something going on there.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, released.

The iconic Western movie, of course.

It's a movie that I haven't reviewed yet (I guess this will have to suffice for the review), in spite of an effort here to catch movies of interest that are "period pieces", if you will, which all non fantasy movies set in the past are.

The 1969 movie is one of the best loved and best remembered western movies.  It took a much different tone in regard to Western criminals than the other major Western of the same year, The Wild Bunch.  I frankly prefer The Wild Bunch, which as I earlier noted is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I love this film as well.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a romanticized and fictionalized version of the story of the two Wyoming centered Western criminals who ranged over the entire state and into the neighboring ones.  In the film, which is set in the very early 1900s before they fled to Boliva, and which follows them into Bolivia, the two, portrayed by film giants Paul Newman (Butch) and Robert Redford (Cassidy), come across as lovable rogues, and barely rogues at that.  The film had a major impact at the box office and came in an era in which the frequently predicted "end of the Western movies" had already come.

The Hole In The Wall Gang, lead by (Robert LeRoy Parker) Butch Cassidy, far right, and Harry Lonabaugh (the Sundance Kid). This photograph was a stupid move and lead to their downfall.

So how accurate is it?

Well, pretty mixed. 

Even the Pinkerton Detective Agency allows that they are the two romanticized Western criminals, and there are quite a few romanticized Western criminals, are closest to their public image. They were intelligent men and got away with their depredations in part as there were locals who liked them well enough not to cooperate with authorities, although that was also true of much less likable Western criminals.  And the vast majority of characters in the film represent real figures who filled the roles that they are portrayed as having in the film.  So in that sense, its surprisingly accurate.

Where it really fails, of course, is in glossing over the fact that they were in fact violent criminals.  And as outlaws their history is both violent and odd for the era.  The Wild Bunch, the criminal gang with which they are most associated, was extremely loosely created, and people came and went, rather than there being just one single group of outlaws.  The Wild Bunch itself generally took refuge, when it needed to, in Johnson County's Hole in the Wall region (their cabin exists to this day) and perhaps because of this or because of several of them being associated with the Bassett sisters, the daughters of a local small rancher, their activities oddly crossed back and forth between pure criminality and association with the small rancher side of the conflict that lead to the Johnson County War.  This latter fact, once again, may have contributed to their image as lovable criminals, even though they themselves were not in the category of individuals like Nate Champion who were actual small cattlemen who were branded as criminals by larger cattle interest. The gang was, rather, made up of actual criminals.

So the depiction of them simply attacking the evil (in the film) Union Pacific is off the mark. They were thieves.  Just less despicable thieves than most.

They did go to Bolivia and their lives did end there, according to the best evidence.  The film accurately portrays their demise coming in the South American country even if it grossly exaggerates that end, persistent rumors of at least Butch's survival aside.

Material detail wise the film is so so.  This late 1960s movie came at a time at which a high degree in material details, a bar set by Lonesome Dove, hadn't yet arrived, so the appearance of things reflects the movie styles of the late 1960s more than the actual appearance of things in the early 1900s.  Arms, however, are correct as in this movie making era the tendency to try to stand out by showing unique items in use hadn't arrived.

All things being considered, it is a great Western and well worth seeing.  It belied the belief that the era of Westerns was over, and in some ways it recalls earlier sweet treatment of Western criminals who were supposed to be just wild boys at heart.  Nobody gets killed in the film until Butch and Sundance do at the bitter end, which contributes to that.  In reality, The Wild Bunch is likely a more realistic portray of Western criminals, but this is a great film.

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact:

Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

One of the things that's aggravating for students of history is the way that popular portrayals botch the depiction of the topic of their interest or interests.  Sometimes this is mildly irritating, and sometimes colossally aggravating.  This is just part of the nature of things, which doesn't make it any less aggravating, and this is just as true of Wyoming history and the depictions of Wyoming and its citizens as it is with any other topic.  I suspect that the residents or students of any one area could say the same thing.

Before I go further with this, however, I should also note that this blog is very far from perfect, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As a daily catalog of Wyoming's history it's doing okay, but even at that, it isn't anywhere near as complete as it should be, and with certain big events in Wyoming's history its grossly incomplete.  A blog of this type should allow a person to follow a developing story as it plays out, and so far, for the most part, this one doesn't do that, that well, yet.  It certainly isn't up to the same standard that the World War Two Day By Day Blog was before it sadly, and mysteriously, terminated on September 24, 2012.  It'll hopefully get better with time, and it's doing okay now, but it is an amateur effort done with very limited time, so it isn't as complete as it should be yet.  We can hope for better in the future, of course, and it is better this year as compared to last.  We can also hope that it gets more comments in the future, which would assist with making it more complete.

Anyhow, while noting that, it's still the case that there are a lot of aggravating errors and depictions out there.  Maybe this blog can correct a few of them, although with its low readership, that's pretty doubtful.  And people cherish myths, so that operates against this as well.

What motivated this is that I was doing a net search for an update of a recent entry here and hit, through the oddity of Google, a website devoted to the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I have not seen.  I'm surprised that there's a fan website devoted to the movie, which of course I have not seen, as I'm surprised by any fan movie site.  A movie has to be of massive greatness, in my view, before I can imagine anyone devoting a blog to it.  Say, Lawrence of Arabia, or a movie of equal greatness. There probably aren't a dozen movies that are that good.  

Anyhow, if a person wants to devote a blog to a movie they really like, but isn't one of the greatest movies of all time, that's their business, but there is a difference between fact and fiction. And the reason I note the site noted is that there's a page on the site the one I hit debating the location of the Brokeback Mountain. The blogger thought it was in one place, but cited author Larry McMurtry for another location.

Well, McMurtry notwithstanding, there is no Brokeback Mountain. The book and movie are fiction.  It makes no more sense to say that some mountain is Brokeback Mountain than it does to say that the Grand Tetons are Spencer's Mountain, unless the point was intended to be that some backdrop for a film was a certain identified location.  If that's the case, i.e., identifying an actual location, I get it, but that's not what they seemed to be debating.  I don't think the film was actually filmed in Wyoming, although I could be mistaken and perhaps some background scenes were (although I don't think so).  Of course, if I am in error, I'm in error, in which case they're trying to identify a location they saw in the film, and I'm off base.

Along these same lines, when the film Unforgiven came out, I went to see it.  The movie was getting a lot of press at the time, and it was hailed as great.  It isn't.  It's not really that good of a film frankly, and I didn't think it was at the time.  I think it was hailed as great as a major Western hadn't been released in quite some time, and it starred Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood has been in some fine movies to be sure, but he's been in some doggy Westerns also, and this one, while not a dog, wasn't great.

At any rate, while watching that film, I recall a young woman asked her date, several rows in front of me, where the town the film depicts, Big Whiskey, Wyoming, was located.  I thought surely he'd say "there isn't one," but, dutifully he identified its location, essentially morphing Whiskey Mountain, a mountain, into the fictional town.  Whiskey Mountain is a real place, but Big Whiskey, the town, is a complete fiction.  It doesn't even sound like the name of a 19th Century Wyoming town.  I don't know of any Wyoming town named after an alcoholic beverage, or even a beverage of any kind.  For that matter, I don't know of any named for anything edible or potable, save for Chugwater.  In the 19th Century, the founders of towns like to name towns after soldiers if they could, which gives us Casper, Sheridan, Rawlins, Lander and probably other locations.  

While on the topic of fictional towns, there's the fictional characters in them.  Big Whiskey, in the film, was ruled over by a well dressed tyrannical sheriff and a well dressed tyrannical Englishman, if I recall correctly.  Tyrannical sheriffs are popular figures in Western movies, and in recent years they're well dressed tyrants.  In quite a few films the tyrannical sheriff is the ally of a tyrannical (probably English) big rancher.

In actuality, sheriffs all stood for election in those days, just as now.  They often had a really rough idea of what law enforcement entailed, but they did not tend to be tyrannical.  They tended to be grossly overworked, covering huge expanses of territory.  They also probably didn't tend to be snappy dressers.  While some of them had been on both sides of the law, quite a few were Frontier types that fell into the job for one reason or another, like Johnson County's "Red" Angus or Park County's Jeremiah Johnson (the famed mountain man).  Sheriff's of that era tended to spend days and in the saddle without the assistance of anyone and often tended to resort to gun play, which average people did as well, but they did not tend to be agents of repression.  If they were, they would loose office pretty quickly.  Probably one of the better depictions of a Frontier lawman is the recent depiction of Marshall Cogburn in the Cohen Brothers version of True Grit.

The tyrannical local big rancher thing is way overdone as well.  The reason that there was a Johnson County War is that the old big landed interests were loosing control so rapidly, not because they were retaining it.  Films like Open Range, or Return to Lonesome Dove, which depict people straying into controlled territory are simply wrong.  The cattle war was more characterized by an ongoing struggle than Medieval fiefdoms.  There were some English and Scottish ranchers as well, but there were big interests that weren't either.  And the both sides in those struggles formed interests groups that involved lots of people, rather than one big entity against the little people, contrary to the image presented in Shane and so many other films.

As part of that, one thing that these period films never seem to get correct is that the West was a territory of vigorous democracy.  Yes, in Wyoming large cattle interests tried to squash the small ones in Johnson and Natrona Counties through a shocking armed invasion, but they also had to content with the ballot box. When things went badly for them in the Invasion, the legislature briefly turned Democratic and Populist.  Newspapers were political arms in those days as well, and they were often exceeding vocal in their opinions.  Their opinions could sometimes be shouted down, or crowded out, but the concept that some English Duke would rule over a vast swatch of territory unopposed is simply incorrect.  More likely his domain would be subject to constant carving up and the sheriff was less than likely to be in his pocket.

While on the topic of films, the way that characters are depicted, visually, is very often incorrect.  In terms of Westerns, to a large extent, films of the 30s and 40s depicted characters the way that film makers wanted them to look, films of the 50s the way that people thought the viewers wanted them to look, films of the 60s reflected the style of day, and so on.  It wasn't until the 1980s, with Lonesome Dove, that a serious effort was made to portray 19th Century Western figures the way they actually looked, with a few really rare exceptions.  Shane, which I otherwise do not like, did accurately portray the visual look of a couple of characters, the best example being the gun man portrayed by Jack Palance. Why they got that one correct, for the region, and few else, is a mystery.  The older film Will Penny did a good job in these regards.  The Culpepper Cattle Company is very well done..  In recent films, the film Tombstone was very accurate in terms of costume for the region it was set in, so much so that it received criticism for the odd dress styles it depicted, even though they were period and location correct.  Modern Westerns tend to botch this if set in Wyoming or the Northern Plains, and are almost never correct in these regards.

Hats get very odd treatment in this context.  From the 20s through the 30s, hats were fanciful in film, and didn't reflect what people actually wore.  In the 50s, the hats that were then in style were shown as being in style in the late 19th Century.  Only recently have historical films generally been correct, and they still hit and miss on films set in the present era.  A lot of movie makers can't tell the difference between Australian drover's hats and real cowboy hats, and would probably be stunned to find that a lot of cowboys look like they did over a century ago, to a large extent.

The expanse of territory is also routinely inaccurate in old and new depictions.  Film depictions of Wyoming either seem to think that Wyoming has the geographic expanse of Alaska or, alternatively, Rhode Island.  Distances seem to be rarely related to the period in which they are set, with some depictions set in the 19th Century seemingly thinking that a town was always nearby, while ones set now seemingly thinking there isn't one for a thousand miles.  Expanses in Wyoming are vast, but the state is not Alaska.  Conversely, ranch and farm geography isn't grasped at all, and frankly its forgotten by most Wyomingites, in a historic concept, now.  Up into the 1930s there were an increasing number of small homesteads, meaning the farm and ranch population, throughout the West, was much higher than it is now.

Probably the single worst depiction of modern geography, geography in general and ranch geography, is the horribly bad film Bad Lands, a fictionalized account of a series of events that actually mostly took place in the Mid West but which ended in Wyoming, in reality.  In that film the teenage murderers are shown driving across the prairie and there's actually an absurd line about being able to see the lights of Cheyenne in the distance in one direction and some extremely far off feature to the north.  In reality, you can not drive a car, any car, across the prairie as the prairie is rough and cut with gullies, ravines, gopher holes, etc.  And there's a lot of barbed wire fences.  The thought, as the movie has it, of driving dozens and dozens of miles straight across the prairie is absurd.  Not quite as absurd as being able to see Cheyenne's lights from a safe vast distance away, however.  Cheyenne sits in a bit of a bowl in the prairie, and if you see its lights, you are pretty close, and if you are driving across the prairie, pretty soon you're going to be entering some ranch yard or F. E. Warren Air Force Base.

One of the best depictions of geography, however, comes in McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, which does get it basically correct, and which the film gets basically correct.  In the film, the cattle are driven across arid eastern Wyoming, which is actually correctly depicted as arid.  Film makers like to show Wyoming as being Jackson's Hole.  Jackson's Hole is Jackson's Hole, and while it is very beautiful, and in Wyoming, it's darned near in Idaho and most of the state doesn't look like that.

On the topic of land, a really goofball idea depicted in many, many, current depictions of Wyoming and Montana is that you can go there and buy a ranch. No, you cannot.  Well, if you have a huge amount of money you can, but otherwise, you are not going to.  In spite of this, films all the time have the idea that people will just go there and buy a ranch.  One episode of Army Wives, for example, had an episode where a Specialist E4 was going to leave the Army and buy a ranch.  Baloney.  Buying any amount of agricultural land actually sufficient to make a living on in the United States is extremely expensive, and you aren't going to do it on Army enlisted pay.  Specialist E4 pay wouldn't buy a house in a lot of Wyoming.  Part of this delusion is based on the fact that in Western conditions the amount of land needed to make a living on is quite large and Eastern standards, which most people have in mind, bear no relationship to this in the West.  Out of state advertisers sometimes take advantage of this ignorance by suggesting that people can buy a "ranch" in some area of Wyoming, by which they mean something like 20 to 40 acres.  That isn't a ranch in the working sense of the words by any means in that there's no earthly way a person could make a living ranching it ,or farming it, or even come anywhere close to making a fraction of a living wage.  I've run into, however, people on odd occasion who live very far from here but believe that they own a ranch, as they bought something of this type site unseen.  In one such instance a person seriously thought he would bring 100 cattle into a small acreage that was dry, and wouldn't even support one.  This, I guess, is an example of where a mis-impression can actually be dangerous to somebody.

On ranching, another common depiction is that it seems to be devoid of work.  People are ranchers, but they seem to have self feeding, self administering, cattle, if a modern ranch is depicted.  Ranching is actually very hard work and a person has to know what they are doing.  Even if a person could purchase all the ranch land and all the cattle they needed to start a ranch (ie., they were super wealthy), unless they had a degree in agriculture and had been exposed to it locally, or they had grown up doing it and therefore had the functional equivalent of a doctorate in agriculture, they'd fail.  This, in fact, is also the case with 19th Century and early 20th Century homesteads, the overwhelming majority of which failed.  People who had agricultural knowledge from further East couldn't apply all of it here, and often had to pull up stakes and move on.  And, often missed, it took a lot of stuff to get started.  One account of a successful Wyoming 19th Century start up homestead I read related how the homesteader had served in Wyoming in the Army for years, specifically saving up his NCO pay and buying equipment years before he filed his homestead, and he still spent a year back east presumably working before he came back and filed.  J. B. Okie, a huge success in the Wyoming sheep industry, worked briefly as a sheepherder, in spite of being vastly wealthy, prior to coming out well funded to start up.  Many of the most successful homesteaders, but certainly not all, had prior exposure to sheep or cattle prior to trying to file a homestead.

On erroneous depictions, one particularly aggravating one is when films attempt to depict what they think the regional accent is.  There is a bit of a regional speech pattern, i.e, an accent, but it's so rarely done accurately that it shouldn't be tried.  For the most part, native Wyomingites have the standard American Mid Western accent, but they tend to mumble it a bit.  That sounds insulting, but it isn't meant to be, and Wyomingites are so attuned to it, as are rural Coloradans and Montanans, that they generally cannot perceive it.  I'm from here, and no doubt I exhibit that accent.  Most people don't recognize an accent at all, and it takes a pretty attuned ear to be able to place it, although some people very definitely can.  I can recall my father having told me of that having occurred to him on a train in the 50s, and I've had it happen once in the 1980s.  In my father's case, the commenter noted that he must be from one of the Rocky Mountain states.  In mine, I was specifically asked by a fellow who had worked for the Park Service for decades if I was from the West Slope of Colorado, as many park rangers were and I had the same accent.  Most Wyomingites, at some point, probably get a puzzled question from somebody about where they are from that's accent based, but the questioner never reveals that.  It's a regional accent, so the best a person can do is tell that you are from rural Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana if they know what the accent entails, or that there even is one.  Film makers, who must be aware that there is an accent, occasionally try to insert one in a modern Western, but when they try it they present a bizarre laughable accent that doesn't occur anywhere on the planet.  Years ago, for example, there were advertisements on television here for the Laramie Project, which is another film I haven't seen, and which I couldn't have watched due to the horribly bad efforts an accent that the filmmakers were attempting. We do not drawl.  We speak more like Tom Brokaw, but perhaps with a bit of mumbling that we don't recognize as mumbling.

I've read that Irishmen find American attempts at an Irish accent hilarious.  Some English attempts at an American Mid Western accent are really bad.  Our accent here is fairly rare, and there's no way that they're going to get it right, and they ought not try.  By not trying, they're closer to the mark.

Movies In History: A River Runs Through It.

A River Runs Through It

This movie is set in Montana in the teens and twenties of the 20th Century, based on a book that was a series of memories by the author who experienced the same.  Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because it was filmed by Robert Redford who lives in the West and who has a good feel for Western topics, it's a good look at the northern plains, and Montana in particular, in that era.

Or even later eras. The close association the protagonists have with the land and rural activities strongly reminds me of my youth in the 1970s.  The way people were part of rural activities, and they were part of them, is really accurately portrayed.  It also does an excellent job of capturing the northern plains of the teens and twenties, at which point they were fully part of American life and distinct at the same time.

Material details of this film are excellent.  The film well depicts the early automobile era and shows why vehicles were adopted so rapidly.  The tightness of communities in the era is well depicted. Clothing and style of dress, even haircuts, are correct.  About my only complaint is that the fly fishing style isn't the one that I'm familiar with, and given as I was taught by people who had learned in the 1930s and 1940s, I wonder if the local style I see here, used by locals, more accurately reflects fishing of this era than that in the film.

August 2, 2014

Addendum.

One of the things I've been surprised about, when I occasionally look at my own reviews, is how short they were, the longer ago they were written.  I don't know if that's good or bad, but its the truth.  Anyhow, I finally got around to reading the novella this film was based on, and I just noted that in another thread here:

September 5, 2019

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Norman Maclean

Most people are familiar with the really excellent movie based on this semi autobiographical novella by Norman Maclean which was made into an excellent movie by Robert Redford.  I just started reading it a few days ago and I'm already well into it.  I'll give, of course, a review of it when I've completed reading it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

September 8, 2019

I finished A River Runs Through It and Other Stories yesterday.

The novella A River Runs Through It has achieved almost mystical status in certain quarters, with it being particularly highly regarded among those who like "western" literature, or perhaps I should say literature of the modern west, although all of these stories are set in the period prior to World War Two.  The reputation is well deserved.

Various reviews attempt to compare the work to other well known authors who wrote in the same genera, with Hemingway being noted.  Well, it's much better than any work of Hemingway's, even if we consider that the Hemingway outdoor works set in the West actually are good, as compared to the rest of his writing which is not all that great, frankly.  A River Runs Through it, the longest of the novellas, is truly a masterpiece.

Maclean describes the West of the 1910s through the 1930s in a way that would be highly recognizable to anyone whose grown up in the real West even today.  The novella is hugely interior, and for that reason the task of putting it on film must have been really difficult to say the least.  To anyone wanting a real grasp of how Westerners see the West and themselves, this novella is the work to read.

One question that a person whose seen the excellent movie may have is how much does the novella depart from the film?  Not much, but it does some, and the film adds some elements that are lacking in the novella.  The novella does not deal with how Norman meets Jessie, his wife, in any fashion.  Jessie Maclean really was from Wolf Point Montana, but the story of their early relationship is completely omitted.  Indeed, throughout much of the novella Norman is already married, including those parts dealing with Jessie's brother.

It's hard to describe the writing of a novel, although this is barely a novel and close to a memoir and that also raises the question here on how much of the story is fiction and how much is fact.  I'm not familiar with Maclean's life enough to know how much of the story is fictionalized, but I suspect its not all that much.  By way of a plot spoiler, one thing that's definitely true, but somewhat fictionalized, is that Paul Davidson (Paul Maclean's actual nom de plum) did indeed die from being beat up in an alley in the late 1930s, just as described, and the murder remains an unsolved murder.  It was a Chicago murder, however, as Norman Maclean had convinced Paul to come to Chicago where he worked as a reporter and for the press office of the University of Chicago.  This wouldn't really fit the Montana centric story line however, as would the fact that Paul was a Dartmouth graduate.

The novella is, I feel, a must read.

As noted, this book contains three stories, not one, although A River Runs Through It is the longest and best known.

The second one is Logging and Pimping and You're Pal, Jim.

Maclean worked as a logger while attending college.  The precise details of that I don't know, but it was for at least two seasons. This novella deals with that and I suspect, and indeed I'm certain, that it's much more fictionalized than A River Runs Through It.  It's also of uneven quality.

In this novella Maclean sought to describe loggers but I suspect that he ended up, as is so often done, by fairly grossly exaggerating his depiction as he went on, which is unfortunate. Some elements of the description, in particular his description of clothing, are really excellent. But it decays as it the novella goes on and this one may be said to have almost no real point, other than being an odd character study.

The third one is USFS 1919, which deals as with Norman's work on a Forest Service crew in 1919.

This one is excellent, and again not only is the story worthwhile, but the descriptions of life at the time, and particularly a very distinct rural occupation of the time, are superb.  Descriptions of horses, packing and Forest Service work in a now bygone era are extremely well done.   This story is also probably mostly fiction, but his work for the Forest Service at a very young age (Norman is 17 when this story takes place, and he'd already worked for the Forest Service for two years) is not.  This novella is well worth reading.

On a couple of other observations, knowing that the movie was from a novella, I've wondered if the plot details of the film were filled out from the other novellas in the book. They are not.  As noted, the film includes story lines, such as Norman meeting Jessie, that aren't in the book at all.  About the only added details provided is that Norman worked as a logger and for the Forest Service, and his work as a logger is mentioned in the film.

Anyhow, the stories included in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories are first rate stories in the modern Western genre and much better than many, maybe most. The stories due have an earthy element to them, and all three have some references to illicit unions of one kind or another, but they aren't graphic and they don't get down in the mud as much as later works of Larry McMurtry.  

I don't have a great deal to add to my earlier movie review that the current novella review doesn't touch on, so my main point here, in adding this addenda, was just to note what was noted.  The film follows the novella pretty closely, but it does add a major story line, the romance between Norman and Jessie, which Norman doesn't touch on in these works at all. She was actually from Montana, as the film portrays, however.  He really did take a teaching position at the University of Chicago.  There are some departures, although they are really minor.  The minor character Mabel, Paul's Indian girlfriend, is much more richly described in the novella than the film, and is a much rougher character as well.  But all in all, it's pretty close.  Indeed, the film is amazingly well done.

One minor thing I'd note is that its surprising how this film seems to be the high water mark (no pun intended) for some of the actors in it, but not others. Brad Pitt went on to fame, but frankly nothing he's done since this film has been as good.  Craig Sheffer continues to act, but he's not anywhere nearly as well known as Pitt and his portrayal of Norman does seem likely to stand as the role he'll be remembered for.  The same will be true for Emily Lloyd's portrayal of Jessie Maclean.  Tom Skerritt, on the other hand, will recalled for having a large number of excellent roles as a character actor, his role as the father of Paul and Norman being one of them.  Nicole Burdette, who portrayed the Indian girlfriend Mabel, has done very little film acting since this movie and the suspicion must be that she doesn't want to.

September 8, 2019.

Movie public service announcement from when ladies wore hats

They Shall Not Grow Old

You still have time to see this.  It will run again in the United States on December 27.

If you are student of history, or of film, this is a must see.

New Zealander Peter Jackson, famous for his Lord of the Ring films (which I have not seen) was asked by the British Imperial War Museum to take their original movie footage and do something, in terms of a film, with it.  Four years later, this is the spectacular result.

Jackson and his crew took over 100 hours of original IWM film footage, restored it, colorized much of it and then selected six hours of that, and then a little less than two, to produce this movie length tribute to the British fighting man of World War One.  Experts in reading lips were hired to determine what soldiers were saying in the film footage where they can be seen speaking and then matched with actors from appropriate regions of the UK to produce film that sounds like original talking film footage.  Background noises for the sounds of war were added as well (the artillery shocked me in the film as its one of the very, very few instances of artillery sounding actually correct, both in the firing and in the impact. . . it turns out that new recordings of the New Zealand Army's artillery were taken for that effort).

For the voice over, or narration, as to what is being depicted, Jackson relied up on the BBC's series of interviews of British veterans of World War One that were done in the 1960s and 1970s.  These were recently run as a BBC podcast as well, so some individuals may be familiar with this set.  Using it for the film produced an excellent first person result.

There's nothing really like this to compare it to.  It was a huge effort and that produced a very worthwhile result.  Highly recommended.

As an aside, the title comes from Laurence Binyon's 1914 poem, For the Fallen.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, 

England mourns for her dead across the sea. 

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, 

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal 

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, 

There is music in the midst of desolation 

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, 

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. 

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; 

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning 

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; 

They sit no more at familiar tables of home; 

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; 

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, 

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, 

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known 

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, 

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; 

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, 

To the end, to the end, they remain.

Movies In History: The Americans.

The television drama The Americans is to spy thrillers what The Wild Bunch is to westerns. . . tense, morally problematic, violent and great.

For those not familiar with it, and they are apparently few, The Americans was a FX Network television series that ran from 2013 to 2018.  It's available on Amazon Prime now so that a viewer can watch the entire series, although a viewer should beware. . .it's one that a person will almost certainly binge watch.

The series follows two Soviet sleeper agents, "Philip and Elizabeth Jennings", inserted into the United States in the late 1960s, during the 1980s.  At this time the couple is well established as Washington D. C. suburbanites, posing as the husband and wife owner of a D. C. travel agency.  They have two children, Henry and Paige, with Paige being the older child of the two.  When the series starts off, neither of the children have any idea that their parents are Soviet spies, or that they're their parents are Russians.  In the first episode Stan Beeman, an FBI agent in counterintelligence, moves in by happenstance across the street.  All four characters appear in all 75 episodes of the series as their tale plays out.

Now, almost any review of this series, nearly all of which, if not all of which, are positive contain massive plot spoilers.  I'm going to do that as well, but only after a sharp line below so you can tell where the plot spoilers start.  As our focus is generally on the historical nature, and its accuracy, of a cinematic or television portrayal, we'll start with that first.

The Jennings, their pseudonym for their cover, are of course the main focus, along with the story of Stan Beeman, who works in counterintelligence and who unknowingly moves in across the street from somebody he's actually looking for.  But how accurate is this portrayal of sleeper agents?

Well, that's somewhat difficult to know because. . .well they are spies. And I don't myself know a lot about late Cold War Soviet spies. What I can say is that the series is extremely violent and fairly graphic in other ways and that it accordingly exaggerates.

The sleeper agents in this series are shown to get involved in situations that often result in bloody killings. And as part of their covers they routinely engage in sexual relationships with unknowing Americans who become attached to what they think is a single interested party.  Moreover, at the start of the series the Elizabeth character is shown to be not only a dedicated Communist but to have pretty much completely suspended her morality in service of the cause.  How accurate it that?

Well, it's all clearly exaggerated, in part because most "sleeper agents" were just that, dormant.  But based on what we do know about Soviet spies, or perhaps what I should say is what I know, its exaggerated but not completely fictionalized.

My knowledge of Soviet spies mostly comes from a series of books that deal with them in the pre World War Two era, the World War Two era, and the immediate post World War Two era.  And in that era the Soviets were in fact really good at both getting spies into foreign countries and giving them pretty good cover. Some did run businesses, sometimes with great success in fact.  Their personal conduct in fact was often shockingly libertine.   And they could be lethal, although not at the rivers of blood level that's depicted in the series.  So, in terms of their general depiction, its exaggerated, but now wholly made up.

And we do know that the Russians in fact inserted couples into the United States, their cover thereby being better than singles who might be suspect. And we also know that at least in the case of post Soviet Russia, the children of sleeper agents might in fact be wholly ignorant of their parents' secret role. 

So, the series makes drama by taking liberties, but it doesn't create the spycraft and its nature out of whole cloth.

The ending of the series is tense and incredibly enigmatic.  We're left with a massive amount hanging in the air, but artfully.  Everyone has debated the fate of the characters, seemingly, including the actors who appeared on the show who can be found in interviews to speculate on the fate of various characters, most particularly Paige, a character who was extensively developed during the series.

Usually we deal with a few things such as historiography and material history.  Generally, the show did these very well. Starting off in the Reagan era, which is in fact central to the plot, the drama did a good job of recreating the late Cold War situation and taking it forward.  In terms of material details, it also did very well getting the look and background of the early 1980s right.

A word of warning.  Just the other day we published a note on the old Hays Production Code and this show definitely violates it in spades.   While its in context, there's a massive amount of sexual conduct and nudity in this show, enough to really be problematic.  It doesn't wreck the show, in my opinion, for a conscientious viewer, but it does cross a certain line.