Friday's Old Fashioned: Strange Victory (1948)

In watching the recently reviewed “Pressure” about the D-Day invasion, I was reminded of Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in-advance speech to his troops in which he declared that “nothing less than full victory” would be acceptable. But what, exactly, constituted full victory in WWII? That’s the question director Leo Hurwitz puts forth in his aptly named “Strange Victory,” finished all of three years after the second world war, by demonstrating with blunt style that the United States of America could not claim to honor all the ideals it had ostensibly fought and died for in the name of liberal democracy. Stitching together archival footage and dramatic re-enactments to underscore the various points of the archival footage, “Strange Victory” was deemed a documentary but comes across more akin to a visual essay. That sensation is brought home in the voiceover by co-writer Saul Levitt which is not dispassionate but barely concealed rage at what is being conveyed onscreen. An introductory overview of WWII’s conclusion is constructed out of graphic imagery that cuts the heart right out of any nostalgia and evokes a collective trauma that has been repressed rather than dealt with and fuels the anger and fear in the form of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism coursing the post-war America, as Levitt asks, again and again, “If we won, what did we win?”

If it’s freedom, “Strange Victory” illustrates, we have a funny way of showing it. In Hurwitz’s most daring conceptualization, he blends a brutal rundown of the effects Jim Crow laws with a montage outlining the insidious rise of the Third Reich and in effect, links our own post-war fearmongering with theirs, providing a different spin on that old standby line of scriptural reassurance: if God is for us, who could be against us? He even mixes and matches images of newborn babies, black and white, and their black and white mothers, with images of whites only signs and colored entrances, living the idea that while all men might be created equal, as the declaration says, the society we have constructed once newborns leave the hospital proves just the opposite. In demonstrating oppression of the era, predictably “Strange Victory” was suppressed itself, with a lack of major distribution making it difficult to see. It calls to mind what is currently transpiring with the suppression of history by the current Presidential administration at the Smithsonian, as if embodying “Strange Victory’s” own conclusion, that there is a war still going on at home, waiting to be won. 

Some Drivel On...Inside Man

Released 20 years ago, Spike Lee’s rare foray into something approximating genre filmmaking suggested Sidney Lumet’s own New York bank robbery classic “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) played at a different tempo. The latter’s bank robber, Sonny Wortzik, was not only based on a real person but animated, high-strung, and forced to improvise when his plans go awry. The bank robber of “Inside Man,” on the other hand, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), is a cool cucumber. “Don’t I sound relaxed to you?” he asks the hostage negotiator at one point in the voice of a man who has mapped out every possible contingency. Indeed, the meta structure of Russell Gerwitz’s elaborate screenplay is established with Dalton breaking the fourth wall as the movie begins by explaining directly to the camera who he is and what he plans to do, that is, “execute the perfect bank robbery.” So, he does. The remaining two-hours-and-nine-minutes is showing how he executes it, though without giving away the most crucial elements until the very end, giving “Inside Man” the feel of a deconstructed magic trick, like David Copperfield telling you he is going to make the Statue of Liberty disappear and then showing you exactly how he makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Dalton Russell is the perfect role for Clive Owen. The part requires outsized self-confidence, and Owen has always excelled at imbuing outsized self-confidence without appearing to exert any effort at all. His face is hidden behind a mask and sunglasses virtually the entire movie, yet the baritone of his voice and his presence make the person unmistakable even if the screenplay by design is never really infusing a sense of personality to keep him a mystery. Denzel Washington, then, makes for the perfect counterpart as boisterous Detective Keith Frazier who is enlisted as lead hostage negotiator when Russell and his small team take 50 hostages inside the Manhattan Trust Bank and put their exacting plan in motion. Even when Frazier is forced into a bout of introductory exposition, Washington sells it with genuine crackle, just as when he walks, he struts in the manner of his Detroit Red version of Malcolm X. Frazier’s boss is throwing him a bone, so to speak, after a run of bad luck and Washington seizes on that bit of backstory, moving through the movie like his character is seizing the day. Yet, if Frazier is smart enough to know Dalton is frying bigger fish, he is too much a small fry in the pecking order to do something about it. That is reflected in the harsh light of the third key character, Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a nebulous if high-powered fixer who has to broker the robbery for the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) hiding a crucial secret. Palpably relishing the opportunity to play against type, Foster’s own enthusiasm deliciously melds with the character’s enthusiasm for virtually eating the lunch of everyone in her orbit. And though White is shorter than all the surrounding characters in height, in her tall stilettoes, not to mention Foster’s imposing aura, she seems no less towering, a gargoyle on the edge of a building come to life.

And so, these three characters circle one another as events play out, Dalton seeming to deliberately stall for time, and Frazier sensing that he seems to be deliberately stalling for time. Lee interrupts this straight-forward structure throughout with scenes in the aftermath of the robbery as Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), interview the hostages, all of whom are suspects given the sly diversionary tactics that Russell employs not only to confuse the police but to throw them off the real scent. It’s an ingenious device that not only heightens the tension but evokes how Lee is deconstructing the nature of the bank robbery movie itself just as a sequence later in which the police prepare to storm the bank, we see imagined scenes of how it might unfold, as if Lee is showing us how such a movie might typically stage its conclusion and then pulling the rug out from under us just as Dalton pulls the rug out from under Frazier and White and everyone else. The ending relies on a striking bit of coincidence, I grant you that, but I also can’t say that I mind. Dalton had already made the Statue of Liberty disappear, after all, so why couldn’t he perform one last miracle?

Normal

The small Minnesota town giving Ben Wheatley’s action-comedy “Normal” its name is reminiscent of the English village Sandford in 2007’s action-comedy “Hot Fuzz” in so much as its idyllic nature belies a bevy of unhinged arms-toting citizens. The latter held that twist for a good chunk of its running time whereas “Normal” gives it away immediately in its Tokyo-set prologue where a Yakuza boss dispatches a pair of underlings who have failed him to the American Midwest. This is one of the more interesting decisions that screenwriter Derek Kolstad (he conceived of the story with star Bob Odenkirk) makes. It means that Normal’s interim Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) is the only one unaware of the town’s nefarious underbelly, including the audience, stressing the feeling of his being an outsider. Gradually, as he gets to know the tiny police force and meets other members of the community, he begins to suspect something is amiss in the death of Normal’s previous Sheriff, setting out to uncover the truth.

It’s a solid-enough set-up, an American western on the frozen tundra, but Kolstad’s script never finesses its ideas. There is something potentially interesting in a small town circa Right Now choosing to go all-in with the Yakuza to survive but “Normal” isn’t sure what to make of it – right, wrong, or in-between – and lets it burn out while Sheriff Ulysses’s backstory is hopelessly wan and means the conclusion lacks additional emotional punch. Indeed, the ever-changing factions of Normal, good helping bad and vice versa, provides some spark that never quite goes anywhere because eventually it’s revealed as mere twisty structure for the sake of twisty structure. And fair enough. Normal, Minnesota might as well be a soundstage, a depressed cop movie giving way to a western giving way to Japanese gun-fu, and so on, as if Normal, Minnesota is really just a “Blazing Saddles”-style series of soundstages, one genre followed by another, an elaborate excuse to shoot some people’s limbs off, proving there is more than way to skin a cat.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Violent Saturday (1955)

The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.

Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.

But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?

Some Drivel On...The Contender

Released in the fall of 2000, meaning into a contentious American Presidential election in addition to the roiling wake of the Lewinsky scandal and Starr Report, writer/director Rod Lurie’s political thriller “The Contender” was designed to make waves even as it wound up engendering some unintentional waves too. Its eponymous character is Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), tapped by President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) to be his next Vice President after the death of the current one, though the Republican chair of the nominating committee, Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), plans not merely to oppose this but to “obliterate (her) life.” A smear campaign, in other words, and so perhaps it’s appropriate that “The Contender” not only divided the critics but became victim of something akin to a smear campaign itself. That occurred when co-star Oldman’s words in one publication were misconstrued in another, making it seem as if he insinuated that Lurie caved to his production company Dreamworks and its patron saint, Steven Spielberg, to make the movie more big-D Democrat-friendly. Afterwards, Oldman contended his issue was only with Lurie in so much as the filmmaker compromised “The Contender’s” ethical and moral ambiguity to render it a more straightforward story of heroes and villains. Frankly, Oldman is not wrong in his assessment. A genuine melodramatic entertainment, “The Contender” also seems to come bearing sharp fangs in depicting statecraft until they are revealed as nothing more than a set of costume teeth. 

Runyon’s ammunition for character assassination is explicit photos that emerge of what is purported to be a college-age Hanson engaging in lewd acts at a frat house. The Senator from the great state of Ohio not only does not confirm nor deny their legitimacy, but she also publicly refuses to even acknowledge them, much to the chagrin of White House Chief of Staff Kermit Newman (Sam Elliott). Newman even yearns to hit back at Runyon with some character assassination ammo of their own. “Come on, Kermit,” Hanson derides, “if we do that, we’re no better than he is.” “We are,” Newman replies with Elliott emphasizing the second word, “no better than he is,” a line that has been ringing in my head during this whole divisive midterm election season. Like it or not, Laine is judged in the venerable court of public opinion, even if that venerable court is shown to be influenced if not outright shaped by the media and by political actors goosing the media. When Runyon rhetorically asks why the American people will believe him, he says, “Because I will have a big microphone in front of me,” evocative of “The Contender’s” oft juicy dialogue. Politics, however, do not take place only in front of the camera, but off them, and in an astonishingly deft performance, Bridges creates one of our all-time great movie presidents. Evans is a chameleon who is skilled at operating in either environment, virtually glowing with affability in the presence of others while simultaneously maintaining an unmistakable assertiveness (the running gag of Evans procuring food in meetings from the White House chef is as funny it is telling) while coming across cunning and even savage behind the scenes.

Evans is practicing politics, in other words, in the true sense of the word, all their wheeling, dealing, and not so much persuading as bulldozing, demonstrating how even what might be noble ideals are always swimming in raw sewage-infested waters. Even noble ideals are in question, however, as President Evans wanting to install Hanson as VP is summarized as being less about what she stands for than POTUS’s own “swan song” while Runyon never even explicates a good reason why he wants to do her in. “She’s no good,” he tells his wife Maggie (Irene Ziegler) in the middle of the night in his pajamas and slippers while sipping milk, a shot that truly makes him look like nothing beyond a bitter old man. Yet, even if “The Contender” does a bang-up job demonstrating “politics as power, nothing more,” as the philosopher X once said, where the notions of character are immaterial in more ways than one, Lurie pulls his punch at the conclusion with two revelations that repaint the political arena as angels and devils and a place where character counts after all. Maybe he could have swung it had he stuck to the complicated portraits of these people that he seems to be generating, but the two climactic twists negate that possibility. And whether from narrative cowardice, or bleeding-heart intentions, Lurie inadvertently yet revealingly transforms “The Contender” into a manifestation of the most dangerous kind of politician: one that believes in their own bullshit. 

Pressure

There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.

“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.

As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.

For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.

Choose Your Agamemnon

Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.

Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.